Aaa

Aboutism









Sometime around the beginning of what we call “the third millen-

nium” (the year 2000 in the Western system of dating years), my

long-time friend, the San Francisco-born, Vancouver poet George

Stanley half-jokingly invented “aboutism.” Among other things,

aboutism proposes that a poem — or any other literary work for that

matter — should be, after all, about something. Aboutism stands in

contrast to the contemporary poetries of linguistic abstractionism or

verse containing no more than local anecdotal significance, and

whose context is restricted to the expressive self rather than con-

nected to the world. And underlying that dictum about poetry is the

suggestion that one’s life, too, should be about something.

In his book At Andy’s, George Stanley’s poems are described (in a

back cover blurb) as being “about movies, ballparks, hockey, dogs,

sex, aging” and various trips Stanley had made “to Calgary and Ver-

acruz, Ireland and Scotland, his return to Terrace, B.C., where he

lived for fifteen years . . .”

And so they are. But I immediately noticed something peculiar

about the whole idea of aboutism. When you read one of Stanley’s

poems, one, say, ostensibly about a few half-stoned men watching

hockey on TV, or the comings-and-goings of Terrace, a small town in

northwestern British Columbia, Canada, it turns out that the poem is

also about capitalism, about television, about the phenomenological

events in the poet’s mind, about advertising (“the car drives into your

head & is wedged there, & the beer pours through your veins —”),

about the nature of language, about one’s decentered location in the

cosmos, about the problems of writing, about ruthless mortality and

about “the huge surrounding fucked reality.” (I especially like that

last, big, fuzzy concept, “the huge surrounding fucked reality.”) The

poems are not only about something, they’re also almost always

about everything.

Aboutism is George Stanley’s reminder — to himself and others —

that art is, finally, about the world. A related but slightly different

idea appears in contemporary philosophy in one of Richard Rorty’s

essays, when he says, “Certainly we should not think of our [philo-

sophical] claims answering to how anyone or everyone takes things

7

8 | the short version



to be, but neither should we take them to answer to how things really

are. The alternative is to take them as about things, but not as

answering to anything, either objects or opinions . . . Aboutness, like

truth, is indefinable, and none the worse for that.”

In relation to art, aboutism is a game, but within it is a fairly serious

parody of contemporary literary movements. In fact, were it not

saved by its playful aspects, aboutism would be a slightly reactionary

doctrine — though not actively retrograde, like the so-called New

Formalism in poetry (or, the “New Formaldahyde,” as Stanley calls

it). But aboutism is reactive in the sense that it rejects a lot of the out-

comes, if not the intent, of the late 20th century literary movement

known as Language Poetry. That movement proposed a kind of writ-

ing that would be self-consciously critical of the banal characteristics

of much of contemporary poetry, including its tendency to regard

itself as making priestly pronouncements, all of which had only

served to remove poetry even further from public consciousness and

reduce it to a minor art understood solely by a select readership. In

the “pomo-speak” style that Language Poetry critical writing

favoured, the movement argued for “a self-critical poetry, minus the

short-circuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege” that “might dissolve the

antinomies of marginality.”

Aboutism doesn’t object to that idea. But what was wrong with a

lot of the poems by the Language Poets is that you couldn’t make

head or tail of what they were saying; the results were often irreferen-

tial, in the sense that they didn’t seem to be about anything, or any-

thing most people could understand, despite the effort to break “the

automatism of the poetic ‘I’.” Language Poetry wanted to get rid of

the authorial voice, to produce a kind of “view from nowhere,” on

the grounds that the “I” inevitably distorted the world. Whether the

storyteller can be eliminated from the story and its telling is arguable

(I think it’s a dubious proposition) but, in any case, Language Poetry

seemed just as marginal as any other marginal writing. Does any of

this matter? Yes, of course, it does. How we tell the story, what we

write about, our understanding of the function of writing are all

issues for every writer, to which the idea of aboutism offers one possi-

ble response.

Like other ideas, aboutism is not just an abstraction existing in a

vacuum, but is part of a discourse whose context is both autobio-

graphical and about the world. In the mornings, at the college just

outside of Vancouver where I work, before we go off to teach our

8:30 classes to sleepy-headed students, Ryan Knighton, Reg Johan-

son, and I imagine aboutism. Ryan and Reg are the next generation of

writers and teachers at the college, while George Stanley and I, in our

sixties, are just about to be put out to pasture. Reg, though not an

Aboutism | 9

Aboutist, is willing to humour Ryan and me. He or Ryan, conjuring

up the yet-to-be-written “Aboutist Manifesto,” cites the movement’s

first axiom: “Theory guards us from error. We are for error.” I.e., art

wants to risk making mistakes.

Ryan insists that the name of the doctrine be pronounced in the

French manner — “a-boo-tisme.” Its practitioners can then be

known as “Aboutistas,” he says. The quirky shift from French to

Spanish is a comical way of celebrating the current Mexican Zap-

atista political movement, or a comment on Starbucks coffee shops

referring to its workers as barristas. Ten years from now, I think, this

semantic fooling around, which enlivened a few of our mornings (and

thus gave us courage to talk to the students), will no doubt be

inscrutible to readers. I imagine a project to recover — from the

secret crannies and undervalued protocols of literary production — a

history of lost literary jokes, and the pleasures they invoke.

Just before we leave for class, I suddenly cry out from my flimsy-

walled office cubicle, imitating the strangled voices of dinosaurs I

heard in “prehistoric” movie melodramas when I was a teenager. The

movies had names like 100 Million B.C., and though they were far

less “realistic” than contemporary digitalized dinosaur movies, they

were much more scary. My high-pitched wail — a sort of

“Wrrraghurrooaa” — echoes down the fibreboard corridor of the

Humanities Division to Ryan’s office at the far end. Though my

unpremeditated outburst is just a goofy, anti-professorial mockery of

us academics studiously preparing our lesson plans before class,

there’s something curiously authentic from my childhood under its

surface. Maybe those movies gave me my first sense that, as George

Stanley puts it in another poem, “Things cry out against each other

— / the world, the image / I have of it, whirled back / in time, into

nothing —.”

“The sounds of professors in their cages,” I say, but think: We cry

out. I can hear Reg, in a similar cubbyhole across the hall, chuckling

at my send-up of classroom “preparation” (an activity solemnly

invoked in union contracts between the college and the teachers). Per-

haps I’m hinting that these days professors have been reduced to the

evolutionary obsolescence of dinosaurs, but the immediate point of

making fun of preparation is that there’s no way to be prepared for

anything. Then we head off to our classes, perfectly unprepared

Aboutistas, energetically ready to talk about the world.





PS : Predictably, as soon as a few people started taking aboutism

half-seriously, Stanley announced that aboutism was over. He pro-

posed an academic conference: “Aboutism: What Was It All About?”

Acknowledgements









I’m one of those readers devoted to the paraphernalia of books. I like

prefaces, forewords, introductions, contents pages, epilogues, after-

words, appendices, bibliographies, indexes, even the “running heads”

of authors’ names and chapter titles, and the fine print data on the

verso of the title page. Of all the extra-textual materials, I’m particu-

larly fond of acknowledgements and often find myself reading long

lists of the names of those people who helped the author, as if I’ll run

into someone I know (or even myself). Acknowledgements usually

appear at the beginning or end of the book, but in an ABC book, of

course, they enter the text itself.

Most of the writings in this book were first read, criticized and

edited by Brian Fawcett, and early versions of many of the pieces here

were initially posted on the Dooney’s Café website, dooneyscafe.com,

the digital space over which Fawcett has presided. Other pieces also

appeared elsewhere, and I’m particularly grateful to Stephen Osborne

and Geist magazine in Vancouver, and Frank Berberich and Lettre

International in Berlin for their attention and encouragement. Several

people read and were kind enough to comment on parts of this book,

or assisted me in other ways. Among them: Lanny Beckman, Robin

Blaser, Carellin Brooks, John Dixon, Daniel Gawthrop, Mark John-

son, Ryan Knighton, Don Larventz, Thomas Marquard, Rolf Mau-

rer, Audrey McClellan, Ilonka Opitz, Bob Perrey, Renee Rodin, Tom

Sandborn, Nikolai Schmarbeck, Bruce Serafin, and George Stanley.

Finally, I like the traditional last line of acknowledgements, in

which those who aided the author are absolved of blame for his mis-

takes, and the writer declares, “Whatever errors of fact or interpreta-

tion that remain are the responsibility of the author.”









10

Adam









I n Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (c. 1432) — which I saw in St.

Bavo’s Church in Ghent, Belgium in spring 2002 — in the upper left-

hand panel of the triptych, there’s a portrait of a naked Adam, driven

from Paradise, taking the first irreversible step out of the Garden of

Eden. What I notice are the sole and carefully rendered toes of

Adam’s right foot, lifted in a step that, through an optical trick of van

Eyck’s art, steps out of the narrow frame of the picture. I think of the

old saw: The hardest step on any journey is the first. To which George

Stanley tartly responded: “The hardest step on every journey / is the

last, and every step is the last”. The aphorism can bear one more

addendum: And every step, first or last, is the expulsion.









11

Adolescence









W hile I was an adolescent, everything that is crucial to my identity

happened. Because those adolescent experiences were so vivid, I

could never accept the notions of the determining impact of either the

unconscious or the affective power of early childhood traumas with

any enthusiasm. So, I’m not a Freudian even though it was the reign-

ing psychological ideology during the 1950s when I was growing up.

The general ideas of Freud are plausible in the abstract if not in the

specifics, but I remain deeply resistant to the concept that we are pri-

marily shaped by our infantile experiences.

Adolescence as the determining period of the creation of the self

seems more common-sensically true. As an adolescent, my relation-

ships with the boys with whom I played sandlot baseball and went to

Marshall, and then Austin High School in Chicago — the Murphy

brothers, Eddie Lacy, Bob Greenspan, Abe Dorevich, Nick Kinnis,

Elliot Goldman, Mel Weisberg — set the parameters of my notions of

friendship, loyalty, physical beauty and desire. Adolescence is when I

first contemplated the nature of the starry universe; became engrossed

in politics (the McCarthy-Army U.S. Senate hearings on communism

were on TV and I watched them after school); and acquired a taste for

“bohemian” company — in drama class with Sandra S., “Bunny,”

Chuck Harris. Adolescence is also when I began to write.

One day, age 13 or so, around the onset of adolescence, I was work-

ing — inkily and ineptly — in the school mimeograph room (Sumner

Elementary School) with Bob Perna, a local “tough” of Mediter-

ranean lineage. He told me about an uncle of his who was an artist. I

looked up blankly from the clicking drum of the mimeo and regis-

tered his disappointment that I failed to recognize the name of his rel-

ative, Salvador Dalí, or the remarkableness of being so related. After

all, I was supposed to be a “brain.” I was awed by Perna’s sophistica-

tion, his assumption that one should surely know who Dalí was, by

the intimation that a larger world existed and could be the concern of

people like me. Much later, coincidentally, I became particularly fond

of Dalí’s paintings — just the other day I was again looking at his

Narcissus — notwithstanding the contempt in which he’s held by the

official art world, which regards him as something of a fraud.

12

Adonis









Here’s the sort of thing that not infrequently happens to me: I’m sit-

ting in Berlin one rainy summer afternoon reading, in a desultory

way, the electronic edition of the New York Times. I happen upon an

article about an Arabic-language poet who, the headline says, “dares

to differ.” I click onto it thinking no more than, OK, some guy who

dissents from the madness of Islamic politics. Good.

But in the article, apart from its topical account of an Arab literary

dissenter, I learn that 72-year-old Adonis, a Syrian-born writer named

Ali Ahmad Said until he took the name of a Greek god as his nom-de-

plume at 19, is “widely considered the Arab world’s greatest living

poet.” Among other things, he lives in exile in Paris but is spending

the year in Berlin (so we’re in the same city, as I’m reading the article);

he’s a modernist, as important to 20th century Arab-language poetry

as T.S. Eliot is to poetry in English; he rejects Islamic ideology, and is

also critical of equivalent Western nonsense; etc.

A few lines of a prose poem, “Remembering The First Century,” are

quoted: “We blunder through prophecy as if through sand. ‘Brother,

show us a sign that shall prevail.’ History crumbles downhill like a

babble of ants that choke on their own dust, on the filth of snails, on

shell after shell . . .”

All of the article’s claims about the greatness of Adonis strike me as

completely believable. And I’m thunderstruck. Maybe I shouldn’t be,

but I am. It’s as if the newspaper article is announcing the discovery

of a whole new continent. I perhaps had heard Adonis’s unusual pen-

name, but paid no attention. I think I confused him with some

African or Caribbean “dub” poet. How is it possible that I’ve lived a

relatively long life that includes knowing quite a bit about poetry and

yet I knew, until that moment, nothing about Adonis? There is no end

to ignorance, or at least no end to my ignorance. I’ll have to reconfig-

ure my picture of the world, my mappa mundi, not only now, this

very minute, but probably right up to my very last breath.









13

Irene Aebi









M emory, quick as a gift: In the copy of Marguerite Duras’s Practi-

calities that Irene Aebi gave me (because she knew of my fondness for

Duras), I find her inscription in French, “For my friend Stan (who

always remains the young man that I knew), affectionately, Irene.”

We were both young. It was in Naples, Italy, around 1960. I was in

the U.S. Navy, stationed near Naples, and she was a Swiss girl, work-

ing as an assistant to a biologist doing research in immunology,

studying chicken eggs under a microscope. The three of us met

because he was looking for help in writing up his findings. Irene and I

became friends. She was tomboyish, with short-cropped blond hair

and strong cheekbones — a look that was made fashionable by the

actress Jean Seberg when she appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath-

less. As a Swiss, Irene was quadrophonic, speaking a melange of Eng-

lish, French, Italian and German. She was the first European I knew.

A couple of years later, Irene visited me in San Francisco. Then there

was a gap of many years. When she reappeared — it was in Vancou-

ver in the 1980s — her life was transformed. In her new incarnation,

she was a singer and occasional violinist who performed with her

partner, the famous jazz soprano saxophonist, Steve Lacy. They lived

together in Paris, but Irene often found periodic refuge at the Sylvia

Hotel in Vancouver. That’s where she gave me the Duras book. We

were no longer young, but our conversations, about books, art, ideas,

retain the adolescent excitement of a lifetime.









14

Of African descent









M y father owned or worked in a series of more or less failing gro-

cery stores in black neighbourhoods on the South Side of Chicago for

some twenty-five years, roughly between 1940 and the mid-1960s.

His stores foundered because of the appearance of large, new, chain

supermarkets, a feature of post-World War II capitalist development

that ultimately doomed the independent corner groceries. It was the

era when the South Side, as historian Robert Stepto writes, “bur-

geoned as thousands of African Americans, almost exclusively from

the south, migrated to the city during the Great Migration of the

World War II years.”

Among the first black people to whom I was formally introduced —

at about age five, one Sunday morning while accompanying my

father to the store — was a plainclothes Chicago policeman named

Two-Gun Pete. When we shook hands, his large paw engulfed my

tiny one, and I noticed how the pink flesh of his palm contrasted

against the dark brown skin on the back of his hand. Was I shown

and allowed to touch the mother-of-pearl handle of one of his fabled

guns, or was I merely told about them? My father impressed upon me

Two-Gun Pete’s prowess and fearlessness. He’d just as soon shoot a

man as look at him, people said of Pete in tones of awe.

A couple of years ago, on television, I watched scenes of black

“unrest” in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the wake of a police shooting of an

unarmed African-American teenager, the latest in a string of similar

killings over a number of years there. Like the other viewers, I was

left with a few violent, familiar visuals: the plate glass window of a

shop being smashed; a gaggle of young black men, several of them

shirtless, running across a flame-licked urban landscape; a grainy

video clip filmed at night, whose soundtrack carries an occasional

police gunshot; the talking head of the sombre white mayor of

Cincinnati declaring a curfew; a grieving mother. The succession of

pictures provide a sort of check-list of scenes meant to prove that this

“riot” is comparable to previous riots impressionistically stored in

viewers’ memory banks. Intentionally or not, the visuals successfully

hinder any understanding of what might be going on.

“Race-relations” or, more properly, the impoverished, horizonless

15

16 | the short version



condition of masses of black people in blighted city cores across the

United States, remains the great American internal political disgrace

of the second half of the twentieth century. But the bare declaration

of the atrocity — and it is an undoubted atrocity, long drawn-out as

well as punctuated by incidents such as those in Cincinnati — hardly

conveys the horror of hundreds of thousands of slowly lost black

lives in America.

When I look back on the time during which I grew up, the ubiqui-

tous racism is now more apparent, even if it was only the muted ver-

sion absorbed in my family, which, on my mother’s side, included

several small shopkeepers whose customers were mostly black. Then,

African-Americans were known as Negroes, coloureds, or, among

lower-middle-class Jews, the Yiddish term schwartze, derived from

the German word for “black,” was used.

(George Stanley recently observed how thoroughly and rapidly the

term “black” succeeded “negro” in the 1960s; a brown-skinned

woman of Caribbean descent with whom we were talking argued

that the later “African-American” is a questionable usage arising

from dubious aspects of contemporary “identity politics.”)

Did my aunts utter the sentence, in reference to the impending

arrival of a coloured cleaning woman, “Is the schwartze coming over

today?” These relatives of mine, European-descended Jewish Cau-

casians, watched brutal scenes on TV of black civil rights protesters

being menaced by police and dogs in Alabama or Mississippi in the

mid-1950s. And they were probably appalled by the Southern prac-

tice of segregation — separate and unequal toilets, drinking foun-

tains, and schools for Negroes and Whites. Yet their own unthinking

references to blacks simply assumed them to be a separate and yes,

inferior, people. Significantly, the contemporary white race riots of

the early 1950s, against Negroes being apportioned a share of the

newly-built public housing projects right there in Chicago, received

far less attention than the televised barbarities in Georgia.

Apart from acquiring a liberal attitude in support of the black civil

rights movement, as a teenager I was less absorbed by the politics of

race than I was by the ontological mystery of the differences. How

was it possible for human skin to be different colours? I’d encoun-

tered hundreds of black people — customers, workers, and people in

the neighbourhoods on the South Side of Chicago where my father’s

successive failing stores were located. They included the young black

men my father employed and trained in the skills of meat-cutting and

clerking (valuable trades to acquire, given black unemployment

rates), who in turn taught me to play basketball and instructed me in

the rudiments of boxing in the alley behind the store during our

breaks. I maintained a correspondence with one of them, Frank, a

Of African descent | 17

young man four or five years older than me, after he’d joined the

army and was stationed in Alaska. With the ambition of a budding

author (age thirteen), I proposed that I could “write up” his adven-

tures in the wild.

Although it became conventional in the left-wing identity politics of

the 1980s and 90s to intimate that sexual desire for the coloured

“other” was also a form of imperialist racism (based on a judgment

about white men sleeping with black women), it’s a proposition I’m

inclined to dispute as simplistic and partial. The mystery of skin

colour wasn’t fully impressed upon me until I became infatuated,

around age 14 or 15, with someone I’ll call Jesse Williams, a black

schoolmate in my high school gym class.

I contrived to get the clothes locker next to Jesse’s, and whenever I

could, I lingered in the locker room. I sat next to where Jesse stood on

the wooden bench, looking up in mute adoration. In the crowded

change room, with the sound of showers hissing in the background,

and the noisy horsing around of teenage boys banging locker doors

and snapping towels, onlookers would hardly have noticed me,

although I had the sense that Jesse himself was not unaware of my

furtive glances at his groin as he stepped into his white jockstrap.

I couldn’t have articulated my feelings then. I had barely thought

about homosexuality yet; at most, I had a dim notion of the Freudian

concept that boys passed through “a phase” of love for other boys.

Yet, I felt a distinct difference between my desire for Jesse, and for

others to whom I was attracted— pale blond Protestants, or the Irish

and Jewish kids of my acquaintance. Having grown up with all of the

latter, it seemed as if my attraction to them arose at least partially out

of a shared cultural background in which I had gradually learned

about the possibilities of beauty. Whereas, with Jesse the force of eros

was startling, unprecedented, as if I had invented this particular

recognition of desire all on my own (or as if it had invented me).

Though it’s hardly a cure for racism, desire and a healthy curiosity

about others (a.k.a. xenophilia) seem like first steps away from it that

are as plausible as any others. Equally, relationships between people

of different races that create children of mixed skin colour deliver a

small, more literal blow against racism (in the 1950s such relations

were banned in the U.S. by so-called “miscegenation” laws).

A similar illumination on the intellectual side occurred when I

walked into an algebra class on the first day of the semester and dis-

covered that the teacher, Mr. Harris, was a black man. Clearly there

was a dissonance between the slightly demeaning notion of

schwartzes and the presence of an African-American man who would

instruct us in the mysteries of mathematics, rendered alphabetical

with mysterious x’s and y’s (e.g., 2x times 3y equals 4z; what is x?).

18 | the short version



The developing cognizances — erotic, intellectual — of actual black

people I knew are more informative than the abstract political rheto-

ric of racism deplored. Recently, I happened upon Wayne Miller’s

book of photographs, Chicago’s South Side, 1946-1948, gradually

becoming pleasantly lost in the images of scenes I may have seen for

myself as a boy.

There was no photograph of Two-Gun Pete in Miller’s book, but I

was intuitively certain I would find something. After looking at the

pictures, I turned to Miller’s introductory memoir of shooting those

photographs and immediately found the passage I was seeking. Of

the many hundreds of pictures he had taken a half-century before,

Miller says, he remembers those “of Silvester Washington — a

Chicago Juvenile Police Officer nicknamed ‘Two-Gun Pete’; like the

maverick General George Patton, he sported a pair of pearl-handled

revolvers.” There’s a photo of a contemplative black teenager in a

suit and tie who, according to the caption, is “at the Wabash Avenue

police station presided over by Silvester ‘Two Gun Pete’ Washing-

ton.” The boy appears to be listening to someone just outside the

photo’s frame, likely Two-Gun Pete himself, who also moves just out-

side the frame of my memory.

After Lorca









In the winter of 1958-59, Jack Spicer gave a poetry reading at San

Francisco’s Bread and Wine Mission, a proto-New Age storefront

drop-in centre at the top of Grant Avenue in North Beach run by

Father Pierre Delattre. I was in the U.S. Navy at the time, 18 years

old, stationed at nearby Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, my first

posting after boot camp.

Had I already read about, or seen a picture — in Life magazine —

of “Hube the Cube”? This improbable poster-person for the beatnik

movement was a scruffy, thin man with a black beret whom I some-

times saw walking on Grant Avenue. What got him into Life maga-

zine was the word “oblivion” tattooed on his right bicep, his unique

way of declaring withdrawal from the “rat race” of conventional life

in 1950s America.

When I went into the city, I searched out the “beatniks” and artists,

and occasionally stopped by the Bread and Wine Mission for the free

spaghetti dinner it offered once a week. That’s likely where I heard

about Spicer’s reading.

I hadn’t yet been introduced to Spicer, though I’d read a couple of his

poems in the Evergreen Review a year or two earlier. But I was paying

more attention to the stars of the burgeoning literary movement that

would eventually become the “New American Poetry” — Allen Gins-

berg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder.

In person, Spicer was an ungainly pear-shaped man in his early thir-

ties, his thinning hair swept back from his sun-freckled forehead,

garbed, the first time I saw him, in a rumpled sports jacket and ill-fit-

ting black pants. While he read, he scrunched up his eyes, balled his

chubby fists, and seemed to menacingly chew on the words of his

poems.

I was soon to learn that Spicer, about a year or two before this read-

ing, had experienced one of those extraordinary artistic break-

throughs that often determine a poet’s career and shape the

remainder of his life. That breakthrough is the subject of this passage.

Born in Los Angeles in 1925, and raised there, Spicer had come to

the University of California at Berkeley at the end of World War II

where he fell in with a group of young poets, the most prominent of

19

20 | the short version



whom — Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser and himself — formed a tri-

umvirate at the forefront of a local poetry movement that became

known as the “Berkeley Renaissance.”

A decade later, while briefly and unhappily in New York and

Boston, Spicer found himself at an artistic impasse. True, he had writ-

ten several good poems in the past ten years, predominantly influ-

enced, I think, by the work of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, but as

he said in a poem commemorating the death of jazz musician Charlie

Parker, “Song for Bird and Myself” (1956), “I am dissatisfied with

my poetry, / I am dissatisfied with my sex life, / I am dissatisfied with

the angels I believe in.” In the opening chapter of an unfinished detec-

tive novel he subsequently attempted, Spicer offers a fictional self-

portrait of himself as a stymied, “academic” poet, returning to San

Francisco to seek new inspiration.

Just before his return to San Francisco, Spicer read a new edition of

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Selected Poems (1955), co-edited by Don

Allen, a former Berkeley classmate working in the publishing busi-

ness in New York. Toward the end of 1956, Spicer began dabbling in

some translations of the work of the homosexual Spanish poet who

had been murdered by the Fascists in 1936, at age 38. Spicer was

attracted not only to Lorca’s homoeroticism, but also by the Spanish

poet’s association with surrealism. Lorca had been in love with Sal-

vador Dalí, and was a friend of the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Spicer

was also drawn to Lorca’s Orphic theory of duende, and his interest

in the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman. All of these were

themes that resonated with Spicer’s own poetic concerns. By Christ-

mas 1956, back in San Francisco, Spicer had completed his transla-

tion of Lorca’s angry “Ode to Walt Whitman,” at which point he

became stuck in this still undefined project.

It wasn’t until summer 1957, after conducting a “Magic Work-

shop” for young poets and finishing a brief teaching stint at San Fran-

cisco State College, that his writer’s block broke. When Don Allen

arrived in San Francisco to spend the summer, Spicer had a new

“Lorca” poem to show him practically every day when they met at

Vesuvio’s or The Place, two local North Beach bars. But the poems

weren’t simply translations. As Spicer wrote to Robin Blaser in

Boston in June 1957, “Since school’s been out (for me forever) I’ve

been ignoring my unemployment and translating Lorca . . . I enclose

my eight latest ‘translations.’ Transformations might be a better

word. Several are originals and most of the rest change the poem

vitally. I can’t seem to make anybody understand this or what I’m

doing. They look blank or ask what the Spanish is for a word that

isn’t in Spanish or praise (like Duncan did) an original poem as typi-

cally Lorca. What I am trying to do is establish a tradition. When I’m

After Lorca | 21

through (although I’m sure no one will ever publish them) I’d like

someone as good as I am to translate these translations into French

(or Pushtu) adding more. Do you understand? No. Nobody does.”

A year or so later, in 1958, in the middle of Spicer’s next book,

Admonitions, and as part of the text, there is another letter to Blaser.

“You are right that I don’t now need your criticisms of individual

poems . . . Halfway through After Lorca I discovered that I was writ-

ing a book instead of a series of poems,” Spicer says.

“That is why all my stuff from the past . . . looks foul to me. The

poems belong nowhere. They are one night stands filled (the best of

them) with their own emotions, but pointing nowhere, as meaning-

less as sex in a Turkish bath . . . Look at those other poems. Admire

them if you like. They are beautiful but dumb,” he laments.

“Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should

create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can . . .

Things fit together. We knew that — it is the principle of magic. Two

inconsequential things can combine together to become a conse-

quence. This is true of poems too. A poem is never to be judged by

itself alone. A poem is never by itself alone.” Spicer tells Blaser, “This

is the most important letter that you have ever received.”

Allowing for a bit of vatic hyperbole in the claim that his earlier

poems amount to no more than “one night stands,” what’s interest-

ing is that Spicer’s critical vocabulary uses the colloquial language of

gay cruising to describe his dilemma, asserting that poetry, if not the

poets who write it, is looking for love rather than sex. More impor-

tant, in the midst of writing After Lorca, Spicer discovered the notion

of what he and Blaser would subsequently call the “serial” poem, a

form whose unit of composition is the “book” (using that word in a

way slightly different from its conventional reference), and to be dis-

tinguished from the modern “epic,” such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos, or

Charles Olson’s Maximus, as well as other “long” poems, or poems

in “parts.” In the serial poem, each poem stands on its own, and yet

integrally connects to the other poems that make up the “book.” Fur-

thermore, Spicer conjoins to the serial poem an Orphic theory that

the poem is transmitted, from an unknown outside source, by a

process of “dictation.” For the remainder of his brief life — he died in

1965 — Spicer would write only dictated “books.”

The first result of this breakthrough was After Lorca (1957), a

thoroughly original work and a book unlike any other in American

poetry in its era. Beyond the form of the serial poem, and the mixture

of “transformations” and scrupulously accurate translations (the one

of Lorca’s “Ode to Whitman” is arguably superior to that of any pre-

ceding “professional” translation), Spicer gave the book an elegant

and witty coherence by interweaving the poems with a series of letters

22 | the short version



to the dead Lorca that proclaimed Spicer’s poetics and provided a

sort of self-reflexive narrative of the writing of the poems. As well,

there’s an “introduction” to After Lorca written mock-posthumously

by Lorca himself.

The assumption of the persona of Lorca is Spicer’s first great inven-

tion in After Lorca, creating the trope that not only are the poems

written in the manner of Lorca (hence, “after Lorca”), but that both

Spicer and (the imaginary) Lorca are writing after the death of the

Spanish poet. “Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked

me to write an introduction to this volume,” Lorca begins, in a tone

of dry, mild affront that Spicer sustains throughout the apparently

reluctantly written preface. “My reaction to the manuscript he sent

me (and to the series of letters that are now a part of it) was and is

fundamentally unsympathetic. It seems to me the waste of a consider-

able talent on something which is not worth doing.” However, Lorca

adds, with grim wit, “I have been removed from all contact with

poetry for the last twenty years. The younger generation of poets may

view with pleasure Mr. Spicer’s execution of what seems to me a diffi-

cult and unrewarding task.”

The imaginary world that Spicer conjures up in this first paragraph

is so smoothly and economically presented that its surreal meta-

physics are almost imperceptible — a world in which living poets can

communicate with dead ones by sending them letters through a celes-

tial post office, and in which dead poets have enough of an afterlife to

criticize the living one’s efforts.

Lorca forcefully warns readers that the poems are not translations.

“In even the most literal of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure

in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely

change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I had written

it.” Moreover, there are hybrid poems, half-Lorca, half-Spicer, “giv-

ing rather the effect of an unwilling centaur (modesty forbids me to

speculate which end of the animal is mine),” as well as an equal num-

ber of Spicer’s own poems “executed in a somewhat fanciful imita-

tion of my early style.” Worse, there’s “no indication of which of the

poems belong to which category,” and — in a final twist of the poetic

knife — “I have further complicated the problem (with malice afore-

thought I must admit) by sending Mr. Spicer several poems written

after my death which he has also translated and included here.” As

Lorca puts it, with gallows-humour, “Even the most faithful student

of my work will be hard put to decide what is and what is not Garcia

Lorca as, indeed, he would be if he were to look into my present rest-

ing place.”

The letters to Lorca are “another problem,” says the imaginary

recipient of them. “When Mr. Spicer began sending them to me a few

After Lorca | 23

months ago, I recognized immediately the ‘programmatic letter’ —

the letter one poet writes to another not in any effort to communicate

with him, but rather as a young man whispers his secrets to a scare-

crow, knowing that his young lady is in the distance listening.” In this

case, the young lady “may be a Muse, but the scarecrow nevertheless

quite naturally resents the confidences.” As for the reader of this odd

amalgam, “who is not a party to this singular tryst,” Lorca concedes

that he “may be amused by what he overhears.”

What follows are about thirty brief poems, each dedicated to a

poet, friend, or lover of Spicer’s acquaintance, two surrealist playlets

featuring the silent movie comedian Buster Keaton (about whom

Lorca had in fact written a playlet in his posthumously published

Poet in New York), the famous polemical “Ode to Walt Whitman” in

which Lorca — and Spicer — argue their uncompromising views on

homosexual love, and the interleafed “programmatic” letters.

In the letters, Spicer propounds a poetics whose principal issues are

the relation of language to poetry; the connections or “correspon-

dences” of poems to each other despite their apparent disimilarities

or distance in time, geography and language (a theory created in the

19th century by Rimbaud and Baudelaire); and necessarily, a meta-

physics about art, life, love, and death — the latter realized through a

metaphorical embodiment of “the dead,” who, as Lorca says, “are

notoriously hard to satisfy.”

The poems in After Lorca are unassuming lyrics that nonetheless

often carry the sting of the underlying poetics, but are far from the

spectacular figures and romantic language that first attracted me to

poetry (Allen Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters,” say, “dragging

themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry

fix” — some of whom I would meet in San Francisco). Spicer’s Lorca

poems are stark, melancholy, disciplined, and cerebral. A characteris-

tic one reads:





A Diamond

A Translation for Robert Jones



A diamond

Is there

At the heart of the moon or the branches or my nakedness

And there is nothing in the universe like diamond

Nothing in the whole mind.

The poem is a seagull resting on a pier at the end of the ocean

24 | the short version



A dog howls at the moon

A dog howls at the branches

A dog howls at the nakedness

A dog howling with pure mind.



I ask for the poem to be as pure as a seagull’s belly.



The universe falls apart and discloses a diamond

Two words called seagull are peacefully floating out where the

waves are

The dog is dead there with the moon, with the branches, with

my nakedness

And there is nothing in the universe like diamond

Nothing in the whole mind.



The complex metaphysics of “A Diamond” posit the merciless

interrelationship of person to the world and perhaps something

larger. The ordinary world of “branches,” “a dog,” “seagull,” “the

ocean,” rendered in words — “two words called seagull are peace-

fully floating out where the waves are” — and the binary universe /

“the whole mind,” are offered as alternatives, mediated only by “the

poem.” The howling of Spicer’s dog is far removed from the rhap-

sodic, Whitmanesque “Howl” that Ginsberg had written only a year

or two before. In Spicer’s vision, the universe “falls apart” to disclose

“a diamond” at the heart of things — “the moon or the branches or

my nakedness.” The declaration is that “there is nothing in the uni-

verse like diamond / Nothing in the whole mind,” and that the dia-

mond is the poem.

The letters to Lorca make the poetics more explicit, despite a dialec-

tical elusiveness. Spicer begins with a tactical feint, disclaiming the

importance of the missives. “These letters are to be as temporary as

our poetry is to be permanent,” Spicer tells Lorca. “They will estab-

lish the bulk, the wastage that my sour-stomached contemporaries

demand to help them swallow and digest the pure word. We will use

up our rhetoric here so that it will not appear in our poems.” Several

times Spicer makes unfavourable comparisons of the prose of the let-

ters to poetry. “See how weak prose is,” he says. “These paragraphs

could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty lan-

guages, and they would still be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the

substance of a single image. Prose invents — poetry discloses.”

In the course of enunciating his stance, Spicer also provides, almost

offhandedly, an autobiographical portrait of his own spare life. “A

mad man is talking to himself in the room next to mine. He speaks in

prose. Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will

After Lorca | 25

speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or

attract each other or even listen to each other and nothing will hap-

pen because we will be speaking in prose. I will go home, drunken

and dissatisfied, and sleep — and my dreams will be prose. Even the

subconscious is not patient enough for poetry.” Neither madness,

dreams nor everyday discourse can take us beyond prose; only poetry

can make something “happen.” Spicer adds, almost by way of

respite, “You are dead and the dead are very patient.”

In a further letter, Spicer notes that although “a really perfect poem

has an infinitely small vocabulary,” there is a considerable difficulty

embedded in language and reality. “We want to transfer the immedi-

ate object, the immediate emotion to the poem — and yet the imme-

diate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived

and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and

substitute others. A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. The

words around the immediate shrivel and decay like flesh around the

body . . . Objects, words must be led across time not preserved

against it.”

Finally, on language: “Words are what sticks to the real. We use

them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what

we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as

rope with nothing to be tied to.”

The difficult notion of “the real” and the problem of the “immedi-

ate object” or emotion are taken up in a subsequent letter, one that

would attain some notice as Spicer’s formal statement of poetics

when it was published in editor Don Allen’s New American Poetry,

1945-60. Although many of Spicer’s contemporaries also made state-

ments about poetics, the still-remarkable feature of After Lorca’s

poetics, which are fully embedded in the work of art, is that no Amer-

ican poet had said precisely these things before, and no one had spo-

ken in this intimate, confiding tone of voice about how poetry

worked.

Spicer declares, “I would like to make poems out of real objects.

The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste

— a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper.”

Immediately, and characteristically, Spicer invents a tantalizing

dialectic between the impossibility of poems made out of real lemons

and the reasonableness of a newspaper fragment pasted into a col-

laged artwork. “I would like the moon in my poems to be a real

moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has

nothing to do with the poem — a moon utterly independent of

images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the

real,” Spicer says.

If there is a dialectic between words and the real in poetry, there is

26 | the short version



something similar between mere images and “visibility” within a

poem. “How easy it is in erotic musings or in the truer imagination of

a dream to invent a beautiful boy. How difficult to take a boy in a

blue bathing suit that I have watched as casually as a tree and to

make him visible in a poem as a tree is visible, not as an image or a

picture but as something alive — caught forever in the structure of

words. Live moons, live lemons, live boys in bathing suits. The poem

is a collage of the real.”

But, as Spicer knows as well as the rest of us, “things decay . . . Real

things become garbage. The piece of lemon you shellac to the canvas

begins to develop a mold, the newspaper tells of incredibly ancient

events in forgotten slang, the boy becomes a grandfather. Yes, but the

garbage of the real still reaches out into the current world making its

objects, in turn, visible — lemon calls to lemon, newspaper to news-

paper, boy to boy. As things decay they bring their equivalent into

being.”

That is, “things do not connect; they correspond.” It is the possibil-

ity of correspondence that gives meaning to the otherwise mysterious

notion of “tradition” that Spicer mentions in both his letter to Blaser

and the letters to Lorca. A poet “translates” real objects, “bring[s]

them across language as easily as he can bring them across time.” The

corresponding objects are not at all identical — “that lemon may

become this lemon, or it may even become this piece of seaweed, or

this particular color of gray in this ocean. One does not need to imag-

ine that lemon; one needs to discover it.” Even the letters to Lorca

“correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have writ-

ten . . . and, in turn, some future poet will write something which cor-

responds to them. That is how we dead men write to each other.”

At the end, after other letters and poems, Spicer announces that

“this is the last letter.” The connection between the two poets has

faded away “with the summer. I turn in anger and dissatisfaction to

the things of my life and you return, a disembodied but contagious

spirit, to the printed page.” The communion with the ghost of Garcia

Lorca is over.

How was it ever able to happen? Spicer wonders. “It was a game, I

shout to myself . . . There are no angels, ghosts, or even shadows. It

was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for poetry

that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires.”

Yet, it was real. “The poems are there, the memory not of a vision but

a kind of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasion-

ally looked through my eyes and whispered to me . . .”

In “Radar,” a postscript dedicated to Marianne Moore, Spicer once

more measures the uncertainty of the world in relation to the self, and

the irreparable loss which shadows any such encounter:

After Lorca | 27

No one exactly knows

Exactly how clouds look in the sky

Or the shape of the mountains below them

Or the direction in which fish swim.

No one exactly knows.

The eye is jealous of whatever moves

And the heart

Is too far buried in the sand

To tell.



At Spicer’s reading that night in the winter of 1958-59, he read

from his recent books, Admonitions and A Book of Music, two serial

poems written in 1958. In about six months I would acquire an ele-

mentary understanding that permitted me to see why this poetry was

more interesting than its spectacular, hip cousins, but at the time,

what Spicer read went mostly over my head. Nonetheless, after the

reading, I hung around anyway and fell into conversation with the

poet. Somewhere in the course of talking — perhaps as a result of the

talk, or simply because I was young and attractive, though I wasn’t

any more aware of my beauty than I was of his alleged ugliness —

Spicer produced a rumpled brown paper bag, the kind you could get

at any grocery store. He emphasised that although the books inside

the bag normally sold for one dollar, on this occasion he was giving

me a gift. At which point, he extracted from the paper bag a copy of

After Lorca and handed it to me. Thus, I began my relationship with

my mentor.

AIDS









I only have to re-open the pages of Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time:

An AIDS Memoir, as I did recently, and a lot of it comes back. From

the chilling first sentence — “I don’t know if I will live to finish this”

— the aura of dread that for years permeated every minute of the

time of that plague era returns in force, sending a shudder through

my body. The memory leaves me off-centre, with a survivor’s mixed

feelings of guilt and gratitude, and also, a sense of being curiously

obsolete for possessing personal recollections of what to others can

only be an increasingly distant matter of history. Some 20 years after

the inception of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), and

after or in the midst of subsequent, if lesser, epidemics (Ebola, West

Nile and the SARS viruses), how can I explain what it was like then?

Strange to have lived through — strictly by chance — a plague in my

own lifetime. Strange that its location in people’s minds, including my

own, is now displaced, both temporally and geographically. Strange

that in one sense AIDS is over, but hasn’t at all ended, neither here, in

North America and Europe, where it continues to afflict particular

ethnic and sub-cultural groups, such as intravenous drug users, nor

there. “There” is now Africa, where AIDS rages in catastrophic pro-

portions, with literally millions of people on the verge of death, sim-

ply, as far as I can tell, because “we,” the rich world, won’t give

“them,” the poor world, the drugs they need and can’t afford.

How to give an idea of what it was like then? Through our records

of the plague, our dispatches from the front. There is, not surpris-

ingly, a lot of very good writing about AIDS, from novelist Edmund

White’s fictionalized memoir, The Farewell Symphony to activist-

scholar Douglas Crimp’s militant essays, Melancholia and Moralism.

The amount of good writing is not surprising in the sense that a size-

able number of talented, literate men, their minds “wonderfully con-

centrated,” as Samuel Johnson put it, by the prospect of death,

applied their intelligence to providing a description of the plague.

Even works that are justifiably criticized — journalist Randy Shilts’s

best-selling And the Band Played On and Larry Kramer’s shrilly-

pitched Reports from the Holocaust come to mind — offer moments

of legitimate illumination. But of all the books written in the midst of

28

AIDS | 29

the plague, Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time is the one that had the

greatest impact on me.





I

T he circumstances of Monette’s grief-stricken tale are simple

enough. Set in the mid-1980s, Monette and his friend, Roger Hor-

witz, lovers for a decade, are practically poster-boys for the joys of

middle-aged gay domesticity. There’s “a stucco 1930s cottage high in

a box canyon above [Hollywood’s] Sunset Strip” in which they live,

“a view of the city lights through the coral tree out front and between

the olive and eucalyptus across the way,” while out back “is a garden

court shaded by Chinese elms and a blue-bottom pool that catches

the sun from eleven to three,” and a terrace for dinners with friends

down from San Francisco. There’s a used, bawky, black Jaguar

(upscale successor to a Mercedes), and holidays to Greece or the Cal-

ifornia foreshore at Big Sur. There are understanding parents with a

house in swanky Palm Springs, fashionable restaurants, and an

assortment of therapists and agents. They attend benefit dinners put

on by the gay community, and Roger, a lawyer, and Paul can afford to

sponsor a table. The occasional movie star, prominent producer, or

famous writer passes through the scene of their domestic life.

But there’s a darker side to this middle-class homosexual idyll.

Monette, a once promising poet and novelist, the author of Taking

Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978) and The Gold Diggers (1979), finds him-

self, five or six years later, at age 40, in something of a literary slide,

stalled on a novel and reduced to writing sit-com movie scripts.

There’s a hint of recent past trouble in an otherwise monogamous

relationship. And there is the rumour of the plague.

Monette recalls the “shadowy nonfacts,” “the most fragmented of

rumours” of the early 1980s. He remembers noting in his diary in

December 1981, “ambiguous reports of a ‘gay cancer,’” then adds,

“but I know I didn’t have the slightest picture of the thing. Cancer of

the what? I would have asked, if anyone had known anything.” A

couple of months later, in early 1982, driving to Palm Springs to visit

Roger’s parents, Paul reads aloud from an article in the gay magazine

The Advocate, an article titled “Is Sex Making Us Sick?” As Monette

notes, “There was the slightest edge of irony in the query, an urban

cool that seems almost bucolic now in its innocence. But the article

didn’t mince words,” providing the first in-depth reporting he’d seen

— it wasn’t yet mentioned in the Los Angeles Times — of a mysteri-

ous — was it fatal? — disease that targetted gay men.

“I remember exactly what was going through my mind while I was

30 | the short version



reading,” Monette writes a half-dozen years later. “I was simply

relieved . . . because the article appeared to be saying that there was a

grim progression toward this undefined catastrophe, a set of precon-

ditions — chronic hepatitis, repeated bouts of syphilis, exotic para-

sites. No wonder my first baseline response was to feel safe. It was

them — by which I meant the fast-lane Fire Island crowd, the Sutro

Baths, the world of High Eros. Not us.”

It wasn’t “us,” not yet. Nor was it yet known that the disease didn’t

present a neat set of preconditions. Not until a year and a half later, in

autumn 1983, did Monette get a call from his best friend, Cesar, a

teacher in San Francisco, who reported a swollen gland in his groin

that he was going to get biopsied before the school semester began

again. “AIDS didn’t even cross my mind, though cancer did,” Mon-

ette recalls. “Half joking, Cesar wondered aloud if he dared disturb

our happy friendship with bad news. ‘If it’s bad,’ I said, ‘we’ll handle

it, okay?’” Paul and Roger were busy getting ready for their annual

trip to Big Sur. Paul put the thought away. After all, “even though he

went to the baths a couple of times a week, Cesar wasn’t into any-

thing weird — or that’s how I might have put it at that stage of my

own denial. No hepatitis, no history of VD, built tall and fierce — of

course he was safe.”

But days after their return from Big Sur, Paul arrived home one

evening and “Roger met me gravely at the door. ‘There’s a message

from Cesar,’ he said. ‘It’s not good.’ Numbly I played back the

answering machine, where so much appalling misery would be left on

tape over the years to come, as if a record were crying out to be kept.

‘I have a little bit of bad news.’ Cesar’s voice sounded strained, almost

embarrassed.” Monette spends the evening working his way through

a tangle of telephone calls, bracing himself for cancer news, before he

reaches a mutual acquaintance named Tom. “The lymph nodes, of

course — a hypocondriac knows all there is to know about the sites

of malignancy. Already I was figuring what the treatments might be

. . . I had Cesar practically cured by the time I reached Tom . . . But as

usual with me in crisis, I was jabbering and wouldn’t let Tom get a

word in. Finally he broke through: ‘He’s got it.’ ‘Got what?’” Mon-

ette asks, but he knows at that instant that “it” is something other

than a curable cancer.

The best thing about Monette’s narrative is simply its accurate

accumulation of mundane details. It is like a careful description of

weather — a gathering storm — or a slowly advancing, but relentless,

artillery barrage, closing in on your little foxhole. Though life will

soon be as alien as “living on the moon,” Monette’s text respects the

reality of his experience sufficiently that there is no vain striving to

rise above it, to claim that he’s anything more than a precise instance

AIDS | 31

of something larger. Roger and Paul are ordinary, middle-class gay

men, accustomed to the privileges available to them, not even neces-

sarily the sort of gay men I especially like. They’re politically liberal

but not more than that, fussily self-absorbed (aren’t we all?), “out” in

homosexual terms, but not too out. All of that is part of the unheroic

attraction of Borrowed Time.

Since Monette’s book is a chronicle of a doom foretold, the

inevitable happens: Cesar’s condition deteriorates, Roger falls ill, is

diagnosed with the deadly syndrome, and in turn, Paul tests positive

for the virus. Among their circle of friends and acquaintances, more

and more of them are struck down by what is clearly a plague. We

know all this from the very beginning of Monette’s book, as in a

Greek tragedy where the chorus opens the drama with a recitation of

the plot. Monette, looking back on the wreckage of life, ponders the

difficulty of knowing where to start. “The world around me is

defined now by its endings and its closures — the date on the grave

that follows the hyphen. Roger Horwitz, my beloved friend, died of

complications of AIDS on October 22, 1986 . . . That is the only real

date anymore, casting its icy shadow over all the secular holidays

lovers mark their calendars by,” he says in the first pages.

Further, “the fact is, no one knows where to start with AIDS. Now,

in the seventh year of the calamity” — the time at which Borrowed

Time is being written — “my friends in L.A. can hardly recall what it

felt like any longer, the time before the sickness. Yet we all watched

the toll mount in New York, then in San Francisco, for years before it

ever touched us here. It comes like a slowly dawning horror. At first

you are equipped with a hundred different amulets to keep it far

away. Then someone you know goes into the hospital, and suddenly

you are at high noon in full battle gear.”

Once Roger is hospitalized at the University of California at Los

Angeles, their life together, with sporadic respites over the next year

and a half, increasingly revolves around various rooms and wards at

UCLA hospital. Henceforth, they live on time borrowed from the

future they will not have. But there’s more than one sense of time here.

For gay men of their generation, there’s the “lost time” of having been

in the closet, the years before the declaration of public homosexuality

in 1969. Making up for that lost time perhaps explaims part of the

gay sexual frenzy of the 1970s, a reaction to the recognition that what

was once absolutely forbidden can be transformed into a state in

which everything is permitted. Nor is time here only borrowed from

the future. Recounting an earlier journey to Greece, Monette observes

that “people who travel have dreamlike moments where they borrow

time from the past, but it’s not out-of-body at all. The echo of the

ancient image, warrior or monk, is in you.”

32 | the short version



Finally, time borrowed from the past is the substance of writing. “I

can see us so vividly side by side in bed—reading, dozing, roaming —

always coming around again to that evening anchorage . . . At the

time I thought there were no more layers of innocence to peel . . . I

cannot say what pagan god it was, but I’d gotten in the habit, last

thing at night, of praying: Thank you for this. I’d be tucked up against

my little friend, perfectly still, and thanking the darkness for the time

we’d had — the ten years, the house, the dog, the work. I did, I

counted my blessings . . . I knew what I had and what I stood to lose.

I held it cradled in my arms, eyes open even as I slept. The night watch

from the cliffs at Thera, clear along the moon all the way to Africa.”

Thera was the Greek island city they had visited, destroyed by a vol-

cano in 1500 BCE, perhaps the source of Plato’s myth of Atlantis. A

couple of fresco paintings from its civilization survived, and like

Monette, I’ve seen them in the museum in Athens. I have a postcard.

The rest of Borrowed Time, recounted in tones both measured and

frenetic, is a mixture of inconsolable sorrow, political rage at govern-

ments and media slow to do what they could have done to reduce the

ravages of the plague, moments of hyperventilating panic and claus-

trophobia, and eventually, exhaustion and “the desolate waking to

life alone — this calamity that is all mine, that will not end till I do.”





II

Living in Vancouver, I was on the periphery of AIDS, literally on the

epidemiological margins of a fatal viral epidemic. It was transmitted

mainly through sexual intercourse between gay men, and its epicen-

tres were in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other North

American cities that contained smaller but sizeable homosexual pop-

ulations. But even being on the edge of the plague was close enough

to feel the horror, to become hysterical in the middle of an afternoon,

wake up in a sweat from nightmares (and wonder if it was those

symptomatic “night sweats”), visit dying friends on the 8th floor of

St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver or in a bleak Berlin apartment,

attend countless meetings that Monette describes as “boredom in a

good cause,” remember the dead at memorial services. Close enough

to read Borrowed Time the first time, in 1988, with terror. Monette’s

account was not so different from the plagues referred to by Boccac-

cio in The Decameron, or described in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague

Year and Albert Camus’s The Plague.

I remember calculating my degree of risk by means of a primitive

equation I’d made up: acts plus number of sexual partners minus pre-

cautions taken, over geographical location multiplied by time,

AIDS | 33

equalled risk of exposure. That is, if you were the recipient in acts of

anal intercourse, and had had sex with many people without using

condoms, and if you lived in one of the plague’s epicentres at the time

of the critical mass dissemination of the virus (the early 1970s), the

odds were against you. I had lived in San Francisco for five years or

so before moving to Vancouver in the mid-1960s, just before the

main period of the virus’ silent spread, so my comparative safety was

simply a bio-geographical accident. The same was true of my bed-

room behaviour. It was only at the insistence of a sensible friend in

the early 1980s that I began to obey the protocols of a safer sex, so

again, it was more a matter of chance than prescience that provided

whatever protection I enjoyed.

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was attended by two

particular cruelties. Its incubation period could be as long as a

decade, so the “safer sex” procedures soon undertaken by gay com-

munities (which successfully reduced new infections) would have no

bearing on whether or not you had acquired the virus years before.

Second, there were no available medications for AIDS other than

those to alleviate the accompanying “opportunistic” infections that a

deficient immune system invited. From the mid-80s — the time of

Roger Horwitz’s death — there were experimental drug protocols,

and Monette, with his histrionic energy, chutzpah, and middle-class

gay privilege, was quick to enroll his friend in available programs,

but to no avail. Nothing worked. Retroviral inhibitor drugs, which

don’t cure AIDS but prolong life significantly, wouldn’t be available

for years.

In 1989, the year after Monette’s Borrowed Time appeared and as a

half-million mostly American gay men continued to die, I wrote, in a

book called Buddy’s, a fantasy about “How the Plague Ended”: “It

hadn’t ended with a magic bullet, a cure, or even imperfect treat-

ments.” It ended, in gay communities, because self-education had

dramatically reduced the rate of lethal transmission. “It ended, so it

was said, because we had changed. And the change had changed us,

in ways that were not yet apparent.” And at the end, “we didn’t even

feel relief. Perhaps we permitted ourselves to take note of our exhaus-

tion.” But “what next?” We couldn’t yet turn our attention back to

everyday catastrophes. There were still committees to sit on, hotlines

to staff, the dead to bury, memorials, demonstrations, and the rest.

“Yet, we would continue to desire. We had not ceased grieving . . . we

would continue to cry our eyes out. We would find ourselves numbly

staring at the ocean on a muggy afternoon, then come to, recalling a

dinner engagement. Gradually, it would become a memory, like the

curling, yellow-edged pages of an old newspaper exposed to the air.

But when it ended, we barely noticed.” As it turned out, that effort to

34 | the short version



imagine an end of the plague, at least for the limited “us” that com-

prised gay men in North America — an attempt to provide a bit of

somber political hope — was not that far off the mark. There were

“imperfect treatments,” but today, more than a decade after my fan-

tasy of it ending, gay friends remark to each other on the eery disap-

pearance of the mention of AIDS in the media, or even among

ourselves.

Both the failure of governments and media to respond to AIDS and

the inadequate efforts of scientists to develop effective medications

sparked the politics of AIDS. There were two half-truths promul-

gated by gay activists, crucial to engendering support for a stricken

community, but which can now be viewed in a more balanced retro-

spective light. The first was the slogan, AIDS is not a gay disease, but

one that can strike anybody. That is of course true in a literal sense

but, in reality, the virus was introduced into a primarily gay male

population and, as epidemiologists learned, quickly and “efficiently”

disseminated and contained within that aggregate, aided in part by

that population’s sexual practices at the time. What “leakage” there

was of the virus (through blood transfusion, shared use of needles,

and heterosexual transmission via bisexual men) was limited, and the

grave anticipations of AIDS decimating the “heterosexual commu-

nity” in North America never happened. Like others, I knew that at

the time, but in the face of charges by evil Christian fundamentalists

that “AIDS was God’s punishment” of homosexuals, the claim that

anyone could come down with AIDS was a useful political fiction.

The other half-truth concerned sites of transmission and “promis-

cuity,” and became a point of contention within gay communities as

well as outside, because it touched on one of the central premises of

gay liberation. What public homosexuality proposed at the beginning

of the 1970s was that the whole question of sexuality was up for

grabs. Conventional — i.e., conservative heterosexual —- notions

about who one slept with, how many sexual partners one had, the

motives for sexual activity, and much more, were all subject to chal-

lenge. At the time, homosexuality was news from the front-lines of

human relationships. The subtext of its challenge to conventional

sexuality — especially to the shibboleth that sex was primarily repro-

ductive or creational, rather than recreational — was a broader

attack on institutional arrangements in bourgeois society. At least

that was the case among radical adherents in Gay Liberation Front

groups (I was one of the founders of the GLF Vancouver branch). As

with other revolutionary proposals, there were excesses, in this case,

of sexual activity, as became evident in mounting statistics of venereal

diseases, hepatitis, and amoebic infections. When AIDS struck, a

decade after public homosexuality, the response was often a barely

AIDS | 35

disguised homophobia. “Promiscuity,” it was claimed, violated a law

of nature; homosexuals had brought the plague upon themselves.

In practical terms, gay bathhouses, which facilitated sexual encoun-

ters, were targetted as dangerous sites of AIDS transmission. Even

some gay men themselves called for the temporary closure of such

establishments. But for many gay activists, who had adopted the slo-

gan “Silence=death,” such proposals amounted to a betrayal of the

principles of the gay movement. Hence, their insistence that the vital

issue wasn’t the number of partners or the circumstances of sexual

encounters, but the practice of safer methods of sex. Again, while it is

literally true that transmission of the virus could occur in a single act

of “unprotected” sex, it was simply an epidemiological fact that the

number of partners and the circumstances of the encounters were fac-

tors in the rate of transmission. Though insistence on prudence

against accusations of promiscuity wasn’t the whole truth, again, its

political function was understandable.

If “Silence=death” was a call to act-up against delinquent authori-

ties (Act-Up was the name of a prominent AIDS activist movement),

then one form of acting out, namely, shouting at governments, media

and even at each other equalled a kind of resistance. With respect to

the latter, failure to toe the party line could get you labelled as a trai-

tor. I remember one local incident, now almost comic in retrospect, in

which I found myself on the wrong side of the line. Through my old

friend John Dixon (he was also my colleague in the philosophy

department at the college where we worked), I was a member of the

board of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA),

over which Dixon presided, and which was actively engaged in issues

involving people with AIDS. One of Dixon’s contributions was a

book, Catastrophic Rights (1990), arguing for the civil right to access

to experimental drugs for those struck by catastrophic illness. I was

also a member of the board of the local AIDS organization, one of

those voluntary jobs that seemed to have more to do with bureau-

cracy, budgets and “boredom in a good cause” than the visible saving

of lives. One simply signed up and, indeed, doing so did some good.

At one particularly untimely moment in the midst of the plague, the

local conservative government of the day proposed a quarantine law.

The proposal was in response to tuberculosis cases and had been

innocently requested by the Vancouver public health officer, someone

Dixon and I knew to be an intelligent and sensible medical official.

The initial draft of the law, however, was so loosely written that it

was reasonable for an already beleaguered gay community to see the

spectre of concentration camps. The BCCLA, like other groups,

opposed the initial draft, but rather than using the occasion to mount

a political outcry against an insensitive regime, we successfully lob-

36 | the short version



bied the government to redraft the bill to remove the threat to people

with AIDS, which they did.

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, as one of my friends

wryly says. For supporting the redrafted measure, Dixon and I were

called onto the carpet of a gay community meeting one evening and

afforded the opportunity to be the target of a couple of hours of

angry remonstrance. An intransigent slogan of “No quarantine” was

obviously a simpler battlecry than the complexities of moderate

legalese. As it turned out — BCCLA, as usual, formed a watchdog

committee to monitor the effects of the legislation — no one with

AIDS was ever threatened with quarantine. That minor fact didn’t

prevent the appearance of vitriolic, scurrilous articles in the gay press

(even in gay newspapers that I wrote for), as much as five years after

the fact, questioning the state of my soul. Few self-delusions are more

convincing than righteous anger.

Meanwhile, the wounded continued to die. In outposts at the mar-

gins of the plague, unlike the blitzed epicenters, the deaths may have

been epidemiologically proportional to location, but still, those dying

were not strangers to us. Fred Gilbertson was a large man in his 30s,

a friend of mine from writing groups and the gay newspaper for which

we both wrote. His interests included politics, theology and a demi-

monde of sexuality with which I was also familiar. He had been a

“character” in my book, Buddy’s, and unlike some of the other friends

I’d written about, he enjoyed his appearance as a semi-fictional figure,

taking it, as intended, as a mark of respect for him. For him, the course

of AIDS progressed swiftly. A year after his jovial appearance in my

book, when I visited him at St. Paul’s Hospital near the end, he was

physically shrunken, breathing through an oxygen mask, and without

illusions as to his fate. A few months later (I was writing an epilogue

for the paperback edition of my book), he was dead.

Other people were acquaintances. Dixon and I spent some time

with Kevin Brown, the president of the Vancouver Persons With Aids

organization, working on medical and welfare issues for the disabled.

Brown was one of the many people whose lives became more

focused, as he told me when I interviewed him for a newspaper arti-

cle, as a result of AIDS. Suddenly, because of the disease, he had

become a spokesperson and discovered in himself a reasoned, gentle

articulateness. Another person whom I slightly knew was Jon Gates,

a social democratic activist. Even as he was dying, he had foreseen

that the epicentre of AIDS would shift to Third World countries, and

he campaigned to make drugs available to the destitute parts of the

world years before the crisis in Africa was dimly perceived by the rest

of us. A fellow member of the AIDS Vancouver board was a psychol-

ogist named David. On the last day of his life he held a farewell gar-

AIDS | 37

den party for his friends and acquaintances. I was one of several peo-

ple he had asked to provide drugs for his suicide, which he committed

later that day among a circle of intimates. There were others, of

course. I attended memorial ceremonies for Warren Knechtel, a faun-

like photographer; for literature professor Rob Dunham; for political

activist Maurice Flood. All people I knew. All gone. Now, as the poet

Milosz says, “all they can do is make use of me . . . of my hand hold-

ing the pen, to return among the living for a brief moment.”

Paul Monette did live to finish Borrowed Time and, as it turned out,

quite a bit more. His memoir was accompanied by a suite of poems,

Love Alone, in which he could rage against the dying of the light in

another key. Two novels, Afterlife and Halfway Home, and an auto-

biography, Becoming A Man, followed. Finally, there was a volume of

essays, Last Watch of the Night, published in 1995, the year of his

death, at age 50.

Re-reading Borrowed Time, the terror of the first reading gives way

to measured grief. Grief, as Monette says, “that will not end till I do.”

Woody Allen









In a dream, I was having a conversation with the filmmaker and

actor Woody Allen. We were in a busy university building, the foyer

and staircase crowded with students on their way to classes. Allen

and I were talking about Hegel. Yes, Allen was saying, Hegel on the

subject of tragedy has been very important to me. But have you read

Marulla? he asked, and was surprised when I said I hadn’t. Oh, you

have to, he urged, as he approached the staircase to walk upstairs to

the seminar he was conducting. Just before the dream ended, he said,

referring ironically to something earlier in the conversation, I have to

buy a woman. You mean, I interjected, as he started up the stairs, you

have to buy a novel! Several people around us who had been listening

in as we talked burst out laughing at this, and so did Allen. I basked

in the glow of having made a successful joke in the presence of the

great comic.

Upon waking, I puzzled over the name of the book or author Allen

had recommended, then quickly realized that there’s frequently a ver-

bal distortion or elision in dreams because of the vast distances they

have to travel on their way from the unconscious. Marulla . . .? Mar

. . . Mar . . .? Marcellus . . .? Then I got it. Allen wanted me to read

the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius!

Allen is one of the great, if deliberately underappreciated, artists of

our time. It became fashionable in recent years, among intellectual-

ized elements of the middle classes, to display a sort of knowing con-

tempt about Allen’s films, citing their limitations, repetitiveness, and

other imagined flaws. This critical scorn intersected with scandalous

revelations about Allen’s private life, namely, that he had an affair

with his partner’s adopted daughter, whom he subsequently married.

I’ve no objection to people criticising Allen’s messy personal affairs,

although I think they’re probably irrelevant to the estimate of his

work, or ought to be. But the criticisms of his art seem to me largely

misdirected. One of the objections is a quasi-feminist, ideological

complaint that the main character in many of his films (an obviously

Woody Allen-like alter ego) is always chasing girls and women who

are a zillion years younger than him. Leaving aside the political

debate about whether intergenerational relationships are appropri-

38

Woody Allen | 39

ate, one of the things I like about Allen’s films is the tenacity of the

erotic pursuits of his main Woody Allen-like character, even if they are

self-admittedly neurotic. At least, Allen or his alter ego has a reason-

ably clear idea of the sort of young woman who attracts him and why,

which is more than some people can say about their objects of desire.

Nor has he concealed his desires. In many of his films, he has inves-

tigated, in interesting ways, the source of his amorous obsessions.

Further, the women he portrays in his movies are persons as complex,

anxiety-stricken, and as “real” as the unvarnished self-portrait he

offers of himself. In one of his funniest scenes, in Deconstructing

Harry (1997), his therapist wife Joan (Kirstie Alley), who works out

of their apartment, discovers that Harry (Woody Allen) has been

screwing one of her clients. His character is portrayed as so ethically

obtuse as to be almost endearing:



Alley: I knew when I married you that you were mentally ill, but I

thought that because I was a professional that I could cure you.

Allen: Hey, the last thing you want to do is get down on yourself as

a therapist.



A little later in their screaming match:



Alley: How could you sleep with one of my patients? Don’t you real-

ize that’s a sacred trust?

Allen: We never go out. Where else am I going to find someone?



Which is to say, Allen gets the point about his supposed moral defi-

ciencies, or minimally, his works of art are, like those of most artists,

smarter than he is. More important than judgments about his moral

life, Allen has made great films, creating them over a period of more

than three decades with the regularity of the arrival of the seasons.

The best-known ones, Annie Hall, Manhattan, or Hannah and Her

Sisters, are self-mocking yet sympathetic portraits of elements of the

New York intelligentsia and their risible contemplations of love and

death. He also authored persuasive comic meditations on the nature

of art in The Purple Rose of Cairo and Bullets Over Broadway.

In the latter, a mediocre playwright with a tin ear is forced, in order

to secure financial backing for his play, to cast a talentless actress

who is the girlfriend of a mobster. She’s accompanied to the

rehearsals by a hit man who serves as her bodyguard. The rehearsals

are a disaster, the acting wooden, the play itself stilted. The hit man

makes a small suggestion to the playwright for improving a couple of

lines in the play. At first the artist is resistant, but in the face of

impending catastrophe, he recognizes that the suggested lines have a

40 | the short version



certain versimilitude, are more like what the characters would really

say. Gradually, the hit man — who, it becomes apparent, is the real

artist here — makes more suggestions, until eventually he’s rewriting

and directing the whole thing. And when it becomes clear that the

final sticking point of the production is the untalented girlfriend of

his gangster boss, the artist-hit man unflinchingly uses the tools of his

trade to hilariously solve the artistic impasse. Seldom has a comedy

about art so sure-handedly hit the target.

At one point in Allen’s career, sometime in the 1980s, he felt the

need to make some films in the manner of his own master, Ingmar

Bergman, but in Stardust Memories, a movie about a Woody Allen-

like moviemaker attending a film festival in honour of himself, he had

the wit to conjure up some aliens landing in a spaceship. After asking

the space visitors what he should do with his life and art, their mes-

sage to him was to return to the comic aesthetic of the films of his

youth. “Tell funnier jokes,” the little green men told Allen.

In my dream, when I delivered the punchline about having to buy a

novel rather than a woman, I must have been thinking of Allen’s story

“The Kugelmass Episode” in his book Side Effects. Kugelmass is a

professor at a New York university, his marriage is a disaster, and he’s

trying to persuade his psychotherapist that he needs to have an affair.

When his therapist resists this plea for permission to embark on an

erotic escapade, saying, You need a magician, Kugelmass dumps the

therapist. A couple of weeks later, there’s an unexpected phone call.

The caller is a magician in Brooklyn who announces himself as “Per-

sky,” then adds his stagename, “The Great Persky.” The magician’s

device is a box into which Kugelmass is placed, and the gimmick is

that if you toss a novel into the magic box, you end up travelling

through time and fiction to encounter the female protagonist of the

book. Kugelmass chooses Madame Bovary, and the story goes on to

comically detail Kugelmass’s inevitable misadventures with the

woman of his dreams. Since my name is Persky, I’ve always assumed

that I am a version of The Great Persky.

Allen’s critics regularly announce his decline and demise — he’s lost

it all, all that’s left are one-liners and his pitiable sexual vanity, they

confidently declare — but each year there’s a “Spring Project” and a

“Fall Project.” Not everything works. No surprise there. Yet, as in the

late masterpiece, Deconstructing Harry, Allen still occasionally suc-

ceeds in combining all the signature elements and themes of his work.

He recreates his meschugene relations with his Jewish relatives.

There’s a send-up of his metaphysical preoccupations through a fully

realized portrait of Hell (with fellow comic Billy Crystal doing a turn

as the Devil). He offers reflections on making art and representations

Woody Allen | 41

of desire. The hopeless tangle of all of it is endlessly, brilliantly inter-

woven into his recognition of the temporality of being.

Near the end of the film, there’s a great scene where Allen arrives at

his small alma mater for a ceremony in his honour. Spilling out of the

vehicle which he’s precariously driven upstate from New York City

are his “kidnapped” son from a previous marriage, a gargantuan but

sensible black prostitute, the corpse of a man who has died en route,

and Allen himself, harried as always. What Allen is saying here is that

as absurd as both the voyage and the companions of the voyage may

be, this is the truth of the matter. One does argue with one’s ex-wife

about how to raise the kid. One’s desire takes the form of an Amazon,

and yet she’s interesting and tender as a person, more interesting than

the stereotypes of such persons would make her out to be. One does

have close friends, and sometimes they inexplicably die on you along

the way. In the end, we appear at the obscure ceremony to receive a

minor award, surrounded by the unexpected companions of the pres-

ent moment of the journey as well as by all the ghosts of one’s life,

still chattering, shrieking, kibbitzing, exactly as they did when they

were alive.

Alphabet









W hen I was four years old, my father, Morrie Persky, bought a

blackboard on an easel for me. Across the top of the blackboard, the

alphabet was printed in white letters. My father’s method of instruc-

tion was to draw pictures I requested — a cowboy, say — and then to

write the word on the blackboard, pointing out how the letters of the

word related to the alphabet at the top of the board.

Once I’d mastered the basics, he drew me complicitously into a rou-

tine in which I demonstrated my rudimentary spelling ability to

unsuspecting relatives. At a family gathering, he would show me off

by innocently asking, “Now, Stan, can you spell ‘cat’?”

“C-a-t,” I replied.

“How about ‘bat’?”

“B-a-t,” I dutifully answered, to the silent chorus of adults nodding

approval.

“Spell ‘rat’,” he commanded.

“R-a-t.”

Then — just as boredom was about to set in among our familial

audience — along came the punchline. “Spell ‘idiosyncrasy’,” my

father said in a deadpan voice.

“I-d-i-o-s-y-n-c-r-a-s-y,” I rattled off. My first parlour trick.

Now, much later, I’m tempted beyond the confines of the 26 letters

of the English alphabet. I’m attracted to letters found in other lan-

guages: the Spanish “ñ” that gives us niño and señor, or the double

“ll” for “llama” and “Mario Vargas Llosa.” Also, the small diagonal

slash across the letter “l” in Polish, pronounced as a “w,” as in the

name of the Polish labour leader, Lech Walesa, so that his last name is

pronounced “Va-wen-sa” (the “n” sound comes from a cedilla under

the “e”). I’m equally fond of the German double “s” in “Strasse,”

which has its own sign, ß, and the tongue-twisting “Schloßstraße”

(Castle Street), two streets over from where I live part-time in Berlin.

Finally, there are the various diacritical marks that can be placed

above the letter “s” in Slavic languages to produce a “sh” sound, as

in my childhood Polish nickname, “Staš.”

Beyond that, other orthographies: Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Thai,

Greek. I’ve always wondered why there’s no equivalent in English to

42

Alphabet | 43

Greek’s sensible “theta” sign for the “th” sound. I guess it’s just a

matter of linguistic, um, idiosyncrasy. I suppose I should be grateful

that my ABC’s are not predicated on the thousands of characters in

Chinese — then there would truly be no end.

Angkor Wat







I



I’m a more-than-reluctant traveller. I have no desire to go anywhere.

I just want to sit at my desk in Vancouver and read and write. Walk-

ing up to my local supermarket on 4th Avenue is my idea of a big

adventure.

Yet, again and again, I’ve gone to the ends of the earth, as if pos-

sessed by the ancestral gene of the Wandering Jew. I never intend to

go, since, as I say, I have no desire to go anywhere. So, how to account

for my presence at various times, over many years, in Gdansk, Berlin,

Tirana, Vilnius, Naples, Mexico City, Managua, Shanghai, Bangkok,

Angkor Wat?

I always seem to back into destinations. It is as if it’s not me who

wants to go to a particular place, but rather that the place is calling

me to it. I know that is a romantic fantasy, but often that’s the way it

feels. Take Angkor Wat, an abandoned once-thriving Cambodian

city-civilization from about 800–1450 CE, which surely meets the

definition of the ends of the earth.

I was visiting Bangkok, Thailand, in early 2002 — not because I

wanted to, of course, but because a friend of mine, Dan Gawthrop,

was living there, and encouraged me to visit him. At the Malaysia

Hotel where I was staying, I met a friendly middle-aged American

from Kansas City named Larry who, one morning at breakfast, told

me he wanted to go to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and was looking for

a travelling companion.

It hadn’t occurred to me to go there, but I saw when I located it on a

map that Angkor Wat wasn’t far, just across the Thai-Cambodian

border. What’s more, I’d vaguely heard it had recently been re-opened

to tourists. This was after some three horrific decades in Cambodia:

first, American invasion in the early 1970s, followed by civil war and

the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge, then conquest by neighbour-

ing Vietnam, and finally, a decade of “normalized” but bloody

internecine politics. Now the situation was temporarily stable.

I was tempted, having heard of Angkor Wat as one of the fabled

temple sites of Southeast Asia, one of the “seven wonders of the

world.” But for some minor reason — I think the airfare struck me as

44

Angkor Wat | 45

unreasonable — I held off. When Larry returned to Bangkok, just

before heading home to the States, he gave me an enthusiastic

account of his visit, and the idea of going there stayed in my mind.

A month later, in February 2002, I found myself at a Bangkok

travel agency. It was just down the street from my hotel, a place I

often passed on my way to the neighbourhood internet café in a nar-

row lane around the corner. The computer shop was a picturesque

place filled with wall clocks, a large gloomy aquarium, and ten-year-

old Thai kids playing Harry Potter video games. A rooster in a pen

across the lane crowed regularly at an ear-splitting pitch. Passing the

travel agency on the way back to the hotel, I thought nothing more

profound than, Oh, what the hell, I’ll just check the fares; it doesn’t

commit me to anything. So, I figuratively backed in. The overland

fare was not only reasonable but ridiculously cheap.

A few days later, at 7 a.m., I was crammed into a mini-van with a

half-dozen or so young foreign backpackers and we were on the high-

way to the border. I’m usually okay once I get to where I’m going but

while in transit I assume the petrified posture of a frightened rabbit.

The backpackers, dressed in shorts and floppies, were all in pairs, and

at least thirty years younger than me, the only solitary traveller in the

group. The American couple sitting next to me were “doing” Asia, a

half-dozen destinations in two or three weeks, and seemed perfectly

at home in the cramped vehicle, their feet propped up on their enor-

mous rucksacks, eating junk food and mildly debating the compara-

tive merits of the pop novelists whom they were respectively reading,

John Grisham and Stephen King (they seemed to favour the literary

merits of the horror writer King). They were slightly puzzled that I

was staying in Bangkok for a couple of months — what could one

possibly find to do there over such a long time? — and quickly turned

their attention back to their thrilling paperbacks.

After five or six hours on the road, we reached the border. There’s a

Wild West frontier town, Popit (pronounced “Po-peet”), that you

enter after going on foot through the usual complicated customs sta-

tions. Two things were immediately visible: gambling casinos and

bread. The garish gambling palaces, built in the style of equivalent

temples of chance in Las Vegas, are apparently for well-to-do Thai

tourists. The bread, sold by kids who approach you as soon as you hit

Cambodian customs, is a cultural vestige of French colonialism, since

bread isn’t a major feature of southeast Asia’s rice-based cuisine. I

bought a small loaf, which was crusty, delicious, and suddenly exotic

after a couple of months of seldom seeing any bread except the toast

that the hotel in Bangkok provided for Western breakfasts.

After getting our documents stamped, we were reassembled behind

a corrugated metal fence in an empty lot that seemed to be a combi-

46 | the short version



nation of garbage dump and informal bus depot, to wait for the vehi-

cle taking us to Siem Reap, the Cambodian town closest to the

Angkor Wat site. Through an arrangement between the Thai and

Cambodian travel agencies, various tourists in the mini-vans are

combined into a larger group and shifted onto a bus. While standing

around, amid heaps of trash and various vehicles, waiting for our bus

to appear, I reflected that the striking thing about travel is not just the

landscapes but how you become familiar with an instant, if transient,

group of people — backpackers, drivers, travel agents, vendors,

guides and others just hanging about.

I was mainly and anxiously oriented to a young woman in her

twenties named Ma, an obviously bright, efficient person who was in

charge of the complicated business of ferrying the travellers across

the border and recombining them onto the buses for the Cambodian

stage of the trip. My anxiety about keeping her in sight diminished

once we were at the assembly site and I was reasonably sure I wasn’t

going to become a lost straggler, abandoned in the middle of

nowhere. We had to wait an hour or so. I fell into conversation — in

a sort of pidgin made up of various languages — with a teenage boy

who was a guide in Popit. He bought a couple of meat kebobs from a

passing vendor and immediately offered me one of them. The friend-

liness of his unexpected gesture jolted me out of my uneasy anticipa-

tion of the future back to the present and, within a few minutes in

that bedraggled garbage-strewn lot, in the afternoon sun, I began to

fantasize a sort of life that I might lead in that border town. I could

see a table in a motel room at which I would sit, reading and writing.

I think that’s the feature of travelling — in which we reconfigure our

selves in an imaginary way — that changes us.

The vehicle was an ancient, unreliable-looking, battered school bus.

The heat was 30-plus degrees outside and there was no air-condition-

ing. I sat up front, behind the driver. He kept the folding front door

open to get some air circulating. At the last minute, as we were

pulling out, a teenage boy hopped on, not the one I’d been talking

with earlier.

The road on the Cambo side, in contrast to the smooth four-lane

Thai highway, was unpaved, bumpy hard pan. It was the dry season

and everything was coated in a layer of fine tan-coloured dust. Once

the driver got the bus up to speed, he had to close the door to keep the

dust out. It was hot inside, and there was nothing to do but settle in

and gaze at the seemingly featureless landscape — seemingly feature-

less only because I didn’t know what I was looking for — as the bus

headed in a descending direction down the long ribbon of mostly

traffic-free hard pan. The Cambodian teenager introduced himself.

His name was Vonnie, he spoke English, and was an Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat | 47

guide from Siem Reap. He came up to Popit regularly and rode the

bus back with the aim of securing some business from the travellers

headed to Angkor.

Every once in a while, the bus passed through an inhabited place.

As you got near a town, the view changed into agricultural landscape.

The rice fields were dry at this time of the year, so you could see the

banked-up borders of hard earth that enclosed them, and a system of

what looked to be irrigation channels and reservoir pits. The earth-

rimmed fields were designed to keep the rice partially submerged in

water during the growing season. The towns were a sudden jumble of

life, startling after the long stretch of desolate road between habita-

tions. The houses were made of wood and set on stilts because of the

flood season, there were groves of banana and other trees, now cov-

ered in dust, and there were children everywhere, along with the

occasional tethered water buffalo, wandering chickens, and pigs nos-

ing about. It was a quick blur of liveliness — kids playing, people

washing clothes, a bit of a marketplace — and then we were back on

the empty jostling road.

It wasn’t until we passed through the third or fourth farming village

that I realized that the whole point of going overland was to see pre-

cisely this: how the people lived. The noticeable feature of life was the

enormous number of kids. I’d read somewhere that the population of

Cambodia was 13 million now, about half again as many as the about

7 or 8 million it had been in the 1970s. And if more than half of them

were under 15, that meant that the majority of the population hadn’t

been born at the time of the genocide in Cambodia. For teens like

Vonnie, the gruesome image of “the killing fields” was just a piece of

history, as it was for most of the backpackers aboard the bus. Only a

middle-aged woman I glimpsed for an instant in one of the villages, or

an elderly traveller might have the horror as a direct or indirect mem-

ory. So, this is a divided society: grandparents and parents who lived

through hell, and their children for whom the horrors are stories.

It was a long ride, eight hours or more, with a late afternoon lunch

break in the one sizeable town on the route, and a few rest stops

along the way. As it was growing dark, something appeared in the

distance that might be a city, but it was at least a couple of hours

away. Vonnie had circulated among the backpackers, looking for

business, and now dropped into the seat next to mine for the end of

the haul. It was dark when we reached Siem Reap. I had tried to

memorize the map of the town in my guide book, but I quickly lost

track of where I was as we turned this way and that through the

streets. Instead of anything like a sense of direction all I have is the

sort of blurry visual field that 19th century French impressionist

painters invented. I couldn’t get any sense of the streets at night —

48 | the short version



there were only shadowy buildings and the occasional patch of light

provided by a flicker of neon or a string of coloured lightbulbs. The

bus rolled into a compound behind a backpacker hostel.

Since I was a middle-class tourist rather than a backpacker, I asked

Vonnie if he knew how to find the hotel noted in my guide book, the

Golden Angkor. He’d take me there on his motorbike, he told me.

First he had to help unload the rucksacks from the bus. I stood at the

edge of the bustling crowd of backpackers, people from the hostel,

and various kids with motorbikes in the warm, anxiety-tinged night.

Then I was on the back of Vonnie’s motorbike, clutching my satchel

with one hand, and Vonnie with the other, weaving through the dark

streets of Siem Reap.

My expectations of catastrophe, as almost always, were happily

unfulfilled. We neither crashed nor was I abandoned in the middle of

nowhere. The Golden Angkor, once we arrived, turned out to be a per-

fectly nice middle-class hotel, they had a room free, there was a Thai

restaurant next door, and the room had a writing table. Angkor Wat,

Vonnie explained, was about a half hour out of town. You could get

there by motorbike — that’s how he made his living, taking tourists

out to the site — or rent a car and driver. I preferred the latter. He said

he would arrange for me to be picked up at 10 o’clock the next morn-

ing. So, there I was, safe for the night in the middle of nowhere — but

not nowhere for Vonnie and the other people of Siem Reap, a city of

about 800,000 people. Safe, showered, fed, seated at my writing table,

memorizing basic greetings and numbers in Cambodian, which uses a

system based on the number five. So, ten is double-five.





II

In the morning there was no problem getting a little metal tankard of

coffee from the Thai restaurant next door and bringing it up to my

room. After my morning coffee and reading, I took a walk through

the streets of Siem Reap. In the hazy, soft sunlight, the villa-like build-

ings still carried a trace of the town’s French colonial provincial his-

tory, which had lasted until the mid-20th century. There were several

construction sites with new hotels going up. The streets carried a sur-

prising amount of traffic. Even though the map in my mind and the

streets seemed to correlate, I wasn’t very venturesome, going just far

enough to identify various nearby restaurants, a place that sold post-

cards and stamps, a drugstore. At 10, the car and its elderly driver

appeared as promised, along with Vonnie on his bike. I asked Vonnie

how much he charged for a day’s services, and hired him to walk me

around the site, since the driver, who looked older than me and only

Angkor Wat | 49

spoke Cambodian, didn’t seem a likely guide. As a middle-class eld-

erly foreigner who was only likely to see Angkor Wat once in his life,

I wasn’t tempted to skimp.

The reason for this considerable narrative of utterly mundane travel

details and the self-portrait of a timorous narrator-traveller is to

make the contrast with the splendour of Angkor Wat as sharp as pos-

sible. Despite the fame of its great temple, Angkor isn’t just the gigan-

tic, moat-surrounded, five-towered 12th century building that is

mainly referred to by that name. Instead, Angkor is the name of a civ-

ilization that occupied a considerable interior region of Cambodia,

from the once fish-filled Great Lake at the south to the Kulen Plateau

in the north, all of it located partway between what would become

the modern Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh to the southeast (and

the Mekong River delta further south), and the Thai kingdom to the

northwest. So, when you go through the toll station at the entrance to

the Angkor grounds and pay the fee (in American dollars), you’re

entering an area of a hundred square kilometres or more, with fifty or

so temples, and the remains of the towns and water reservoirs built

by successive dynasties over a 600-year period.

We drove along a fairly busy road for about ten minutes — already

at that hour there were busloads of tourists, people on bicycles and

motorbikes, pick-up trucks — until we were moving parallel to the

moat, on the other side of which was Angkor Wat. The driver pulled

into a large, dusty, tree-shaded parking lot opposite the temple.

Behind the lot was a row of open, barn-like sheds with restaurants

and souvenir stands. The tourists getting out of vehicles were quickly

surrounded by groups of kids hawking postcards, T-shirts, and other

items.

Vonnie took me to the low stone bridge across the moat that leads

directly to the main entrance of the temple. The first sense of the mag-

nitude of the place is the scale of the moat surrounding Angkor Wat.

It is some 200 metres wide, and retained on both its inner and outer

banks by walls of laterite and huge blocks of sandstone, cut to fit one

against the next, all of which cover a distance of about 10 kilometres.

At the moment, rather than reflect on the precise facts of the size of

Angkor, I simply went on the impressions I had of the moat’s vast

placid waters and the munificence of the bevelled towers ahead,

located behind the arcaded outer walls of the temple. I picked up the

details later on, reading Charles Higham, the leading Western archeo-

logical expert on the region, author of the rather dry but informative

The Civilization of Angkor.

From the inner edge of the moat there’s a flat grassy expanse,

beyond which stand the outer walls, about 4 or 5 metres high. The

bridge across the moat is linked to the main entrance via a causeway

50 | the short version



whose balustrades are in the form of sculpted mythical beasts,

dragon-like animals known as nagas. Inside the walls, there are a

series of galleries, lotus towers, and various side temples that com-

prise the heart of the complex. The walls of the outermost gallery are

covered with bas-reliefs illustrating the life of the king and his court

at Angkor in the 12th century. Accompanied by Vonnie, I wandered

through the labyrinth of the temple for two or three hours, clamber-

ing over stone doorsteps, ascending the towers, meeting statues of

gods, wandering through sunlight into dark inner chambers.

So, what am I seeing, I asked myself at some point — or maybe at

every point — in the process of moving from scene to scene within the

temple. How does the site of this once-upon-a-time civilization mesh

with the tangle of individual memory and imagination constructed

over a lifetime? First, all travel that’s interesting is a kind of time-

travel, or else it is merely two-dimensional. Here, it’s 2002 and at the

same time, roughly 1150 CE. Angkor is a faerie castle of childhood

books, the Lost City in the jungle, the actual Magic Kingdom, as con-

trasted to kitschy, cartoon-based simulacra of various Disney theme

parks around the world, safe holiday destinations for vacationing

family ensembles.

There’s an important, complex oppositional relationship between

sprawling actual historical sites — Angkor, the Acropolis at Athens,

the Egyptian Pyramids, those in Mexico, etc. — no matter how tarted

up for tourists, and the carefully manufactured fakes. Nor are the

theme parks only located in nations with relatively brief national his-

tories like the United States, which might otherwise be a reason for

their popularity there. They also appear in societies with millennia-

long traditions, and have become a phenomena of globalization. Ian

Buruma, a Western scholar of Asian culture, points out that one of

the cultural conundrums of contemporary China, Japan, Singapore,

and other parts of East Asia is the craze for theme parks, an extraor-

dinary proliferation of which are woven into the new commercial

urban landscapes. “They are to East Asian capitalism what folk danc-

ing festivals were to communism,” Buruma notes. They’re all over

Asia, and “are sometimes as quickly abandoned as they were built, or

even before they were finished . . . What is curious is not just the insa-

tiable taste for these fantasy places, but the fact that they often blur

seamlessly into the ‘real’ urban landscape.”

Buruma is primarily interested in figuring out the political relation-

ship between the theme parks, as well as other replications and simu-

lacra, and the ultimately similar communist and capitalist regimes of

the region. “So why are Chinese officials prepared, or even eager, to

tear down physical evidence of a real past and replace it with

copies?” he wonders. “Why do they appear to be happier with virtual

Angkor Wat | 51

history? And what lies behind the ubiquitous taste for Western theme

parks, for creating an ersatz version of abroad at home?”

Whether considering authoritarian Singapore, the dubious democ-

racy of Japan, or the communist version of capitalism of China,

Buruma believes “there is something inherently authoritarian about

theme parks, and especially the men who create them. Every theme

park is a controlled utopia, a miniature world where everything can

be made to look perfect . . . [and] nothing is left to chance.”

The theme parks, like globalized mega-malls, are themselves

utopian models for the societies in which they’re located, and which

those societies are meant to increasingly resemble. As Buruma

remarks, “Singapore, once likened to a Disneyland with the death

penalty, is truly a place where nothing is left to chance.” Everything is

“subject to elaborate guidelines, more or less forcefully imposed.”

Among the uncertain political prospects of post-Maoist China, one of

them, he suggests, is that the country, “as a continent-sized Singa-

pore, will be the shining model of authoritarian capitalism, saluted by

all illiberal regimes, corporate executives, and other PR men . . . the

whole world as a gigantic theme park, where constant fun and games

will make free thought redundant.”

As-yet-undeveloped Cambodia, by contrast, has to make do with

merely real history. Angkor Wat is relatively uncontrolled. There are

a few paths marked off as not yet cleared of landmines, the occa-

sional rope restraining barrier before the bas-reliefs on the walls of

the galleries, and some uniformed official guides available for hire.

Vonnie told me it was his ambition to ascend into their ranks one day.

But the visitors were free to scramble around the site, skinning their

knees on some precarious steep stairway up the side of a tower, free,

in other words, to make whatever they can of the historical reality in

which they find themselves. The first disjuncture, then, is one of

ontology, of being in the presence of something real in a world whose

character is increasingly virtual, not just by way of manufactured

spectacle, but including all the digitalia of TV screens, computers,

and relentless optics.

Second, as against the ahistorical contemporary theme parks,

which can only be read as a set of signs of postmodernism, at places

like Angkor, you’re confronted with the half-solved historical puzzles

of a vanished civilization. The story, albeit fragmentary, is put

together by scholars like Higham, from the surviving stone or brick

temples, archeological remains of the now dried-out great water

reservoirs, and most important, scattered texts throughout the

region. The “stone inscriptions set into these monuments,” says

Higham, “provide a vital social overlay to the skeletal archeological

remains. These usually incorporate, in Sanskrit, the name or names of

52 | the short version



the founders, the presiding god and the date. Further information fol-

lows in Khmer. The names of the king or benefactor and the gods are

repeated. Although Hindu gods are often named, with a preference

for Shiva, local gods are also mentioned. We find reference to the god

of the cloud, a tree, the old and the young god, and the god at the

double pond . . . “ The characteristic inscription lists the amount of

land belonging to the temple, its boundaries, productive capacities,

the names of people assigned to maintain the temple, and a royal

warning against violating the rules of the establishment. The texts are

absolutely specific. One, reports Higham, “records the assignment of

17 dancers or singers, 23 or 24 record keepers, 19 leaf sewers, 37

artisans including a potter, 11 weavers, 15 spinners and 59 rice field

workers of whom 46 were female.”

The textual records also attest to the power of the kingdom’s rulers.

About Indravarman, a late 9th century king, the inscription says that

“the right hand of this prince, long and powerful, was terrible in

combat when his sword fell on his enemies, scattering them to all

points of the compass. Invincible, he was appeased only by his ene-

mies who turned their backs in surrender.” This claim was engraved

on the foundation stone of a temple in 879 CE, followed by a pledge

made on the king’s accession: “Five days hence, I will begin digging.”

Indravarman lived up to his promise, constructing a huge reservoir of

unprecedented size, 3800 metres long and 800 wide, which is

recorded in another inscription: “He made the [reservoir], mirror of

his glory, like the ocean.”

Angkor Wat was built some 300 years later, the enduring temple of

Suryavarman II, and without question, agree the scholars, the out-

standing achievement of the civilization of Angkor. The foundation

stone, mentioned by later visitors, is missing. What we know is that

the temple was dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu and opens onto

the west, the god’s quarter of the compass. For all its present splen-

dour, Higham tells us, Angkor Wat today is but a grey reflection of its

former state. Traces of gilded stucco remain on the central tower, and

an early 17th century Japanese visitor reported gilding over the stone

bas-relief panels. In the 12th century, it was literally a golden palace.

The 4-metre-high statue of Vishnu remains, still venerated.

In the great illustrated galleries, I came upon the bas-relief panel of

Suryavarman himself, sitting in state upon a wooden throne. He

wears a pointed crown, heavy ear ornaments, a necklace, armlets,

and bracelets. Straps crisscross his pectorals, and there are anklets

above his feet, which are drawn up in a half-lotus posture. A forest of

parasols, large fans, and fly whisks surrounds him as he receives his

ministers, named in the inscriptions, offering scrolls and holding their

hands over their hearts, signalling loyalty and deference.

Angkor Wat | 53

Other sections of the gallery walls show scenes from the Hindu

epics, massive battles with hand to hand combat; Yama, the god of

death, sitting on a water buffalo, determining the fate of each person;

a depiction of “the churning of the ocean of milk in search of the

elixir of immortality.”

But the specific purpose and symbolic meaning of Angkor remain

elusive. A temple, sure, but also a mausoleum for Suryavarman? The

central towers, the scholars think, represent the peaks of Mount

Meru, home of the Hindu gods, while the moat possibly symbolizes

the surrounding ocean, but even if Angkor and its counterparts are

intended as earthly representations of Paradise — the temple as para-

dise theme park? — the explanations are thin and unsatisfactory. Did

the outer wall enclose residential areas and the king’s palace? Where

did the rice-growing peasants live? What about burial rites?

If much of the history is patchy, one macro-feature of the civiliza-

tion is clearer. In addition to its reality, and what we can piece

together of its history, the third thing about Angkor civilization is, in

a Marxist sense, its mode of production. What Angkor is founded on

is rice, water, and labour — surplus rice, control of water, and the

ability to organize, protect and exploit labour power. The mode of

rice cultivation in the region is what’s known as flood retreat agricul-

ture. As the waters of the flood season subside, the rice grows in the

half-submerged earth-banked fields. The point of the farming village

fields I saw on the road to Siem Reap now becomes clear. The func-

tion of the giant reservoirs scattered throughout the region, however,

remains something of a mystery, though one would immediately

imagine some sort of irrigation system as the dry season sets in.

Higham leads readers through an unresolved scholarly controversy

about whether or not the reservoirs were for irrigation or other uses.

But in the end, it is a surplus of rice, controlled by the warriors

through force, that is the basis of dynastic power. Rice makes possible

parasols, fans, fly whisks, kings on thrones, artists to make gilded

stone bas-reliefs of the sinuous bejewelled body of Suryavarman.





III

Vonnie and I made our way back across the bridge over the moat,

found our driver in the shaded parking lot, and I took both of them to

lunch in one of the barn-like sheds that housed the restaurants. Then

we got into the car again and drove along a winding, forested road,

north to Angkor Thom, a city built by the regime succeeding the one

that built Angkor Wat. At the entrance to the city is a stone gate

about 25 metres high, a heap of columns forming a rough arch,

54 | the short version



topped by sculptures of giant, broad-faced, Buddha-like heads in

elaborate headgear. In the centre of Angkor Thom is its main temple,

with fifty or more of the same half-smiling, immense sandstone heads

as the ones at the entrance gate. The heads are carved into the temple

towers. I clambered over the stone slabs of the temple stairways,

cracked and broken over time, crawling up onto a terrace a third of

the way up the towers.

Angkor Thom is the creation of a king named Jayavarman VII, who

was crowned in 1181, after a turbulent period of warfare in which he

repulsed a water-borne invasion — up the Mekong and Tonle Sap

rivers and across the Great Lake — by a rival kingdom to the east.

During Jayavarman’s reign, this great new city north of Angkor Wat

was constructed, with the traditional moat, city walls about 3 kilo-

metres long on all sides, pierced by the entrance gateways and their

colossal heads, one of which we had passed through, and an array of

temples and palaces.

On the walls of the principal temple, as at Angkor Wat, there are

bas-reliefs providing a glimpse of life during Jayavarman’s rule. In

addition to the familiar battle scenes, the striking feature of the

Angkor Thom bas-reliefs is scenes of domestic life that give us some

visual sense of the everyday world of Angkor civilization. In one

panel, a woman in labour is being helped by midwives. In another

scene, two men are hunched over a game resembling chess. Workers

are shaping building stones with chisels in another sculpted picture,

and lifting them by means of a lever. Fishermen are casting nets and

hauling in their catch, women are selling the fish in a marketplace.

Crowds of onlookers watch a cockfight. A man carries a rice basket,

another drives an ox-cart. For scholars and visitors alike, the domes-

tic bas-reliefs are like a newsreel documentary of everyday life. They

flesh out the details of the inscriptions, which record that 2740 offi-

cials and 2202 assistants lived and worked in Jayavarman’s royal city,

and 12,640 people had residential rights within the walls. To feed and

clothe this population, there are scrupulously listed quantities of rice,

honey, molasses, oil, fruit, sesame, millet, beans, butter, milk, and all

clothing materials; “even the number of mosquito nets is set down,”

as Higham notes. Assigned to supply the temple were 66,265 men

and women, a figure rising to 79,365 if you include foreign Burmese

and Cham workers.

A century later, there’s a final, unprecedented, remarkable text

available for Angkor civilization. The king at the end of the 13th cen-

tury is also named Jayavarman and the tangled politics of his regime

are unclear, other than for the evidence that part of the ideological

struggle involved religion. This Jayavarman, the eighth in the line of

that name, was, as Higham reports, a worshipper of Shiva and an

Angkor Wat | 55

iconoclast who destroyed or modified every image of the Buddha that

the two preceding regimes had created. If you really wanted to know

anything about Angkor you’d have to sort out the ideas associated

with Vishnu, Shiva, Buddha, and the rest. But the complex subject of

the struggles between various belief systems promoting rival gods and

philosophies can be left aside here. What’s of interest during Jayavar-

man’s regime is that there’s an eyewitness, one who eventually sat at

the equivalent of a writing table. He’s the man with whom I identify.

He was Chinese and his name is Zhou Daguan. He arrived in

August 1296 as a member of a diplomatic mission from the Chinese

emperor to Cambodia, and he stayed as a guest in a house in Angkor

Thom for eleven months, observing life at the court, in the capital,

and in the countryside. After his return to China, Zhou wrote an

account of his visit, which survived in the Chinese archives, and was

first translated into French in the late 18th century.

Zhou describes the city, with its moat and walls, the gold-covered

stone heads at the gates, which were closed each night and opened

again in the morning, with only “dogs and criminals who had had

their toes cut off . . . barred entry.” Angkor Thom’s golden temples

are recorded, along with the royal palace, the tile-roofed houses of

the nobility and the homes of the lower classes, roofed with thatch. In

the middle-class home in which Zhou lived for almost a year, the

floor is covered by matting, but there is no furniture. Rice is husked

in a mortar and cooked in ceramic vessels on a clay stove. Family

members and Zhou sit on mats and eat from ceramic or copper

plates. A half-coconut shell serves as a ladle, small cups made of

woven leaves contain sauces. They drink wine made from honey and

rice. At night, everyone sleeps on mats laid out on the floor, but it is

so hot that people often get up during the night to bathe. Two or

three families arrange for a ditch to be dug for use as a latrine, which

is covered with leaves.

Zhou also provides an account of the life of the city, punctuated

with religious festivals, fireworks, parades, martial art displays on

elephants, and the twice daily royal audiences given by the king. But

it is in that house where Zhou lived for a year that the human figures

begin to move for us in the present tense, where those countless lives

now utterly lost to memory have a momentary vividness.





IV

Just at the instant of exhaustion in the mid-afternoon sun, as the visu-

al data blurred and I dreaded the prospect of a further excursion, Von-

nie casually mentioned that we could drive back to Siem Reap for a

56 | the short version



mid-day break, and then return to Angkor Wat that evening to watch

the sunset, apparently the custom of both tourists and local inhabi-

tants. Back in the cool hotel room in Siem Reap, I showered, napped,

sat at the writing table with my notebook, like Zhou Daguan.

In the early evening we drove back to the now recognizable great

temple of Angkor Wat. The road was crowded with local people on

bicycles and motorbikes who came out for picnic dinners along the

grassy banks around the moat. I sat on the steps of one of the temple

entrances, facing west, watching the sun slide below the tops of dis-

tant groves of trees.

Back in Siem Reap that night, I ate at one of the restaurants I’d

noted on my morning walkabout, practiced my few phrases of Cam-

bodian on the waiters, took an after dinner walk. On the edges of

town were the shadowy hotel construction sites, not middle-class

hotels, but luxury dwellings going up for a different class of tourist

who would jet in from Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Tokyo. On the way

back from Angkor, I had glimpsed a half-dozen giant gift emporia,

temples for consumers. There was a current of uncertain excitement

among the people I met, a kind of boom-town atmosphere. Those

like Vonnie were quickly learning English. We’d run into some Japan-

ese tourists at the site that afternoon, and I noticed that he’d already

picked up enough Japanese for rudimentary conversations. The

strangers who came to town were an opportunity, and it was all

recent enough that the local Cambodians were still a little unsure

about what these wealthy foreigners wanted, tentative about what

should be offered, how flirtatious to be.

The next morning we drove out to the site and Vonnie walked me

through various temples at a greater distance from Angkor Wat. The

most energetic trek was to a temple atop a hill that you reached by

scrambling up a long slope of broken rock. Once you reached the

summit upon which the temple was perched, you could climb up its

vertiginous staircases for a panoramic view of the countryside. The

hike up the slope, however, was enough for me. I could see the towers

of Angkor poking up in the forested distance. Noticing that I wasn’t

enthusiastic about the clamber down, Vonnie suggested that we could

take the road at the back of the hill, a dirt path that wound gently

downward. The main traffic consisted of elephants carrying tourists

up and down, to and from the temple. When an elephant approached

I pressed against the inner edge of the road to let the great swaying

beast pass.

That was enough. I’d seen what it was possible for me to take in,

unless I was planning to stay for a much longer time. We made a duti-

ful stop at one of the gift temples on the way back to Siem Reap, but

Angkor Wat | 57

I’d already bought an Angkor Wat T-shirt from one of the kids hawk-

ing them in the parking lot, and there wasn’t anything else I wanted.

I’d seen it.





V

Angkor Wat was sacked in 1431 by the Thais, whose kingdom was

based at Ayyuthaya, just north of Bangkok. It was then abandoned to

the jungle. The subsequent history of Angkor is one of its “reception”

— of how it was seen and understood — by explorers, colonial visi-

tors, and now tourists like me.

In the late 16th century, some hundred and fifty years after it had

been abandoned, Portuguese traders and missionaries became aware

of a great city hidden deep in the wilds of Cambodia. The Portuguese

had heard stories of a Cambodian king named Satha, who, while on

an elephant hunt, with his retainers beating a path through the jungle

undergrowth, was brought up short by stone giants and a massive

wall. According to the account, Satha ordered a work-party of sev-

eral thousand men to clear away the jungle, thus exposing the lost

cities of Angkor civilization.

One of the first foreigners was a Capuchin friar, Antonio de Mag-

dalena, who explored the ruined city in 1586. Three years later,

shortly before the friar’s death in a shipwreck, he gave an account of

his visit to Diogo do Couto, official historian of the Portuguese Indies.

“This city is square, with four principal gates, and a fifth which serves

the royal palace,” wrote do Couto, setting down the friar’s recollec-

tions. “The city is surrounded by a moat, crossed by five bridges . . .

The stone blocks of the bridges are of astonishing size. The stones of

the wall are also of an extraordinary size and so joined together that

they look as if they are made of just one stone . . . the source of which

is, amazingly, over 20 leagues away . . .”

The 16th century account goes on to record that “half a league

from this city is a temple called Angar. It is of such extraordinary con-

struction that it is not possible to describe it with a pen, particularly

since it is like no other building in the world. It has towers and deco-

ration and all the refinements which the human genius can conceive

of . . . The temple is surrounded by a moat, and access is by a single

bridge, protected by two stone tigers so grand and fearsome as to

strike terror into the visitor.”

Two decades later, in 1609, Bartolomé de Argensola wrote, “One

finds in the interior within inaccessible forests, a city of 6,000 homes,

called Angon. The monuments and roads are made of marble, and

58 | the short version



are intact. The sculptures are also intact, as if they were modern.

There is a strong wall. The moat, stone-lined, can admit boats . . .

There are epitaphs, inscriptions, which have not been deciphered.

And in all this city—the natives discovered it—there were no people,

no animals, nothing living. I confess I hesitate to write this, it appears

as fantastic as the Atlantis of Plato.” I too hesitate.

French missionaries entered the region in the 17th century; at the

end of the next century Zhou Daguan’s memoir was published in

Paris; and in the mid-19th century, with Cambodia now a French

protectorate, a steady flow of mostly French explorer-naturalists,

photographers, and archeological scholars began the study and

restoration of the monuments. The obscure volumes of the memoirs

of the often strange, wandering, fever-wracked men — I later read

one by Henri Mouhot — can be found occasionally in Bangkok

bookstores.

The next morning, I sat on a bench in front of the Golden Angkor,

along with some local drivers, anxiously wondering whether the bus

bound for Bangkok would actually appear. The desk clerk had assured

me more than once that he had been in contact with Ma, the woman

who handled the travel arrangements. I saw it as a problem in logistics

equivalent to the provisioning of Napoleon’s army in Russia, and like-

ly to have the same doomed outcome. Well, that overstates it, but only

a little, at least from the viewpoint of the reluctant traveller. The bus

arrived, the backpackers were aboard, and we pulled out of Siem

Reap, back onto the highway towards Popit, the border station, and

then onto Bangkok. A young French couple was sitting alongside me.

“How did you like Angkor?” I asked. The woman said, “Oh, the tem-

ples are all right, but we’re more interested in, you know, the people.”

That night the bus pulled into the driveway of the Malaysia Hotel

in Bangkok. There was an odd rush of feeling as I recognized and was

greeted by the familiar faces of the desk clerks, the bellman by the ele-

vator, the waitresses standing at the entrance to the hotel coffee shop.

Did you have a good trip, they asked. “Yes,” I said, “it was astonish-

ing,” then added, as do all returning travellers, “but it’s good to be

home.” In time-travel, what you learn is that home is in the middle of

nowhere, as are we all.

Animals









T he answer to the titular question of Clive Wynne’s Do Animals

Think? (2004) is: Not very much. I mention this not only to dispel

unnecessary suspense but because the students in the first-year uni-

versity philosophy classes that I teach often believe that their dogs,

cats, budgies, and goldfish are thinking pretty much the same

thoughts they are. Unfortunately, some of them are right, I point out

— but I point it out only when I’m in a snide and grumpy mood.

Wynne, a peripatetic academic who grew up on the British Isle of

Wight and is, at last report on his book jacket, a psychology profes-

sor at the University of Florida, asks, “Are we human beings alone on

this planet in our consciously thinking minds, or are we surrounded

by knowers whose thoughts are just too alien for us to understand?”

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously suggested, If a lion

were to speak, we would not understand what it said. Although there

is a lot of popular mysticism about animal minds, the answer Wynne

comes to in his book is that we humans are alone in the kind of think-

ing we do, at least until some recognizable artificial intelligence

comes along. Yet the urban and jungle myths persist. “If I had a

penny for every time I have been told that chimpanzees are geneti-

cally as nearly identical to us as makes no difference and, given

appropriate training, can communicate in human language,” Wynne

says, “I would have a great pile of small change.” Ditto for tales

about dolphins using “an elaborate language among themselves that

we are not smart enough to decode,” to say nothing of whale songs,

weeping elephants, and loyal hounds.

Of course, animals are wonderful, and Wynne devotes a large part

of his book to writing charmingly about the behaviour of honeybees,

bats, pigeons and dolphins. Each species has unique sensory capabili-

ties, from the sonar of bats and dolphins, to the ability to see ultra-

violet light possessed by birds, and the sensitivity to electric and

magnetic fields experienced by some fish. “The obscure Australian

duck-billed platypus can tell if a battery has any current left in it,”

Wynne notes in one of dozens of oddball factoids he provides, then

deadpans, “though there are easier methods of testing batteries.” At

the same time that there is tremendous diversity in the animal king-

59

60 | the short version



dom, there are shared “basic psychological processes like learning

and some kinds of memory, along with simple forms of concept for-

mation, such as identifying objects as being the same or different

from other objects . . . All of these seem to be common to a wide

range of species and to operate in similar ways in animals as diverse

as chicks and chimpanzees.”

But there’s a difference that makes a difference. “After forty years

of trying we can say definitively that no nonhuman primate (or any

other species) has ever developed anything equivalent to human lan-

guage,” Wynne reports. Though humans are distinct, if not utterly

unique, Wynne is not at all suggesting that some “divine intervention

separates us humans from all the rest of creation. In denying human-

style language to any other species, I am not trying to lift humans up

from the beasts and closer to God . . . To admit that humans are dif-

ferent does not return them to the centre of the universe.” That is,

Wynne is a straightforward Darwinian who argues that evolutionary

development is the best explanation of human intelligence and com-

munication capacities.

For most of the animal kingdom and nature, “red in tooth and

claw,” it looks like instinct, or hardwiring with some adaptive capac-

ities, handles most of what in humans involves thinking. And con-

versely, a lot of what humans think about doesn’t occur in the brains

of non-human animals. In case there’s any doubt about nature being

red in tooth and claw, Wynne provides lots of grisly details about the

lives of digger wasps, who paralyze beetles or locusts and deposit

them in their birthing burrows, so that when the baby wasps emerge

from their eggs, they’ll have something to munch on before digging

out into the big world. But if you interrupt the digger wasp’s birthing

routine, it’ll go back and perform the whole routine over and over, no

matter how many times you interrupt it. The wasp never figures it

out; it is hardwired to do it one way.

Students in the philosophy classes I teach are only momentarily per-

suaded by such examples. Invariably, they return to the question,

“But how do you know that Fido and Felix aren’t thinking just like

us?” Well, I say, they give no evidence of such thinking in their behav-

iour or in their communications, presumably because they don’t have

the kinds of brains that have evolved to do that sort of thing. “But

maybe they’re thinking thoughts, anyway,” they insist, perhaps

thinking of oppressed people under dictatorial regimes who have

thoughts they don’t utter. “Any maybe they have their own way of

communicating them,” the students add, as prepared to entertain the

notion of animal psychic powers as they are to consider human psy-

chics. Even my concession that their pets are sort of thinking about

their student owners’ arrival home from school, and are happy to see

Animals | 61

them, and are sort of thinking about food, walks, taking a pee, or dig-

ging up a well-remembered bone, doesn’t appear to satisfy the stu-

dents. They think me rather cruel and close-minded for denying that

their dogs and cats are pondering the prospects of the local hockey

team winning the league championship, just as they are.

The crux of all this, and “the critical question to bear in mind is,

Has any animal succeeded in learning an open-ended language sys-

tem like our own, or have other species only mastered communica-

tion in a more closed manner . . .?” The notion of chimpanzee speech

acquisition achieved a breakthrough in 1970 when Allen and Beatrice

Gardner taught a chimp named Washoe to use about 125 Ameslan,

or deaf language, signs. “Prior to the Gardners’ research,” Wynne

observes, “the prevailing position was that chimps were incapable of

learning human language because they lacked the specialized brain

structures that underpin its comprehension and production. With the

publication of Washoe’s feats, the new received wisdom became that

chimpanzees only lacked the ability to speak.” What happened after

that was curious. The story of Washoe passed into educated popular

wisdom and became a staple of urban legend.

While the signing chimp achieved popular currency, other

researchers were discovering the limits of chimp language acquisi-

tion. Herbert Terrace of Columbia University published Nim in

1979, an account of his work with a chimpanzee he named Nim

Chimpsky, with a little intended malice towards linguist Noam

Chomsky. Terrace began with a predisposition favouring environ-

mental factors in language learning as opposed to the innate language

acquisition mechanisms proposed by Chomsky. At the end of several

years’ work with Nim, Terrace concluded, according to Wynne, “that

what Nim was doing had little to do with language as we normally

understand it. Instead . . . the chimp had achieved a simpler form of

learning: that making certain signs led to certain consequences. The

chimp had learned to produce certain arm and hand movements to

demand things he wanted: ‘I do this; I get that.’”

Terrace also noted several other limits to chimp learning. The

vocabulary acquired by apes, about 250 words over three or four

years, is pretty modest compared to human infant acquisition rates.

The chimps never experienced the “spurt” of language learning that

occurs in humans at about age two. Although there is a bit of contro-

versy about particular primates and their vocabularies, Wynne

reminds readers that “though it is always fashionable to bemoan the

limited vocabulary of contemporary youth, the average U.S. high

school graduate knows about 40,000 words.” I’m not sure I’ve

observed 40,000 word vocabularies in most of my students, but even

a half or a quarter of that puts it beyond mere quantitative compari-

62 | the short version



son with Nim. Of course, the argument about vocabulary size in rela-

tion to chimps is subject to the objection of the irrelevance of criticiz-

ing dancing dogs, since the wonder is that they can dance at all.

But while humans are stringing together little sentences at age three,

“this never happened to Nim. The average length of his utterances

remained stuck at only a little over one word throughout his training

period.” Even more important, neither Nim nor any of the subse-

quent language-acquiring chimps of the 1980s and 90s ever demon-

strated anything close to a minimal grasp of grammar. “And

grammar,” argues Wynne, “is what makes the difference between

being able to express a number of ideas equal to the number of words

you know and being able to express any idea whatsoever.” Grammar

is what turns lexicons into open-ended systems, and without it, you

don’t develop what we call thinking. Yes, there’s some thinking going

on in other primate species, but not much. Wynne comes to similar

conclusions about non-human primate tool-use, self-identification

and “culture.” Yes, there’s a bit of it, “but on the other hand— how

slight this culture is.” (By the way, none of these limitations is an

argument for treating animals badly.)

“For all the excitement and all the TV documentaries,” Wynne con-

cludes, “the so-called ‘language-trained’ apes have not learned lan-

guage . . . They sign or press buttons because doing so gets them what

they want. They can be drilled to string a couple of signs together but

usually can’t be bothered. Although some of them have been in train-

ing for decades, there is nothing to suggest that any of them ever com-

prehend grammar. Grammar is the crucial lubricant that opens

language up from being limited by our vocabulary to being com-

pletely infinite in its expressive possibilities.” As Wynne says at

another point, “Without grammar there is no language.” And maybe,

without language, there isn’t much thinking.



And then: Just as I finished writing a review of Wynne’s book and

posted it on the website magazine I write for, I suddenly remembered

a book in my home library that I hadn’t thought about in years. I

went to my bookshelves, and there it was: Animal Friends, and inside

the cover (a picture of horses and colts on a farm) there was a filled-in

form noting that the book had been presented to me by my Uncle

Docky on my third birthday, January 19, 1944. It was the first book

in my library, and 60 years later, I still had it. The children’s book that

brought me closer to the world of animals would also, through its use

of language, take me irrevocably further from them.

Apartheid









One day in the 1980s, when apartheid still existed in South Africa, I

saw scenes of rioting in the sprawling black African township of

Soweto on the evening television news. The visuals featured menac-

ing armoured vehicles that were more tank than truck, rumbling

through the racially segregated encampment of more than a million

people, spewing tear gas and bullets.

The next day, I was visiting my friend Tom Sandborn. He’d seen the

news, too. As we sat at a picnic table in his sunny Vancouver back-

yard, I said, “Tom, we’ve got to do something.”

This was one of those rare occasions when the famous political

question, “What is to be done?”, had an obvious answer. The black

leadership in South Africa had called for international sanctions

against the country’s white apartheid government, sanctions that

ought to take the form, they advised, of a boycott of products

imported from South Africa. The call for sanctions received the sup-

port of the United Nations and the boycott was being enforced, albeit

haphazardly, by various countries around the world.

One of the few exceptions to the boycott was occurring where Tom

and I lived, in British Columbia, on the west coast of faraway

Canada. Practically every other province in Canada had implemented

a boycott against South African liquor products, but not the conser-

vative provincial government of British Columbia. Even as people in

Soweto were being shot before our televisual eyes, the beefy minister

for liquor sales in British Columbia was justifying the continuing sale

of South African liquor products on the grounds of the sanctity of

consumer rights in a free market. Consumers, he argued, have the

right to individually choose whether or not to support the apartheid

government of South Africa by buying or not buying its products.

Tom didn’t bat an eye. He didn’t engage me in theoretical argu-

ments about the efficacy of the sanctions strategy or about the incon-

venience of engaging in acts of civil disobedience, topics that were the

subject of extended hand-wringing in newspaper columns and among

political activists. Instead, we went straight to his basement and

began rehearsals. Our first task was to learn how to smash a bottle

without cutting our hands. There’s nothing worse than political

63

64 | the short version



klutzes who can’t get the champagne bottle to smash against the

about-to-be-launched ship or who end up a bloody mess themselves.

Since this was to be a symbolic act for the eyes of television cameras,

and since television cameras are easily distracted, we wanted to be

sure that their eyes stayed focused on the bottle rather than any fum-

bling slapstick of ours. Soon, armed with ordinary gardening gloves

and a small hammer, we had progressed to the ranks of journeyman

bottle smashers.

A couple of days later, accompanied by a gaggle of TV cameras and

print reporters whom Tom had alerted, the two of us appeared on the

premises of the B.C. government liquor store at the corner of 18th

and Cambie in Vancouver. Among Tom’s many virtues are his organi-

zational thoroughness and tidiness. He had already cased the store,

and we were able to go directly to the South African wines section.

Furthermore, Tom had phoned the union, informing them of our

intentions, and asking them to tell the workers in the store so that

they wouldn’t be overly alarmed by our criminal act. Finally, Tom

had brought along plastic bags, so that the broken glass and spilled

wine wouldn’t make a mess for the store’s employees.

We each selected a bottle of South African wine, donned our gar-

dening gloves and wielded our hammer while the cameras duly

recorded our minor protest against apartheid and the policies of the

government of British Columbia. There was a bit of a hitch with the

authorities. While Tom borrowed a mop and bucket to tidy up the

floor, I had to remind the store manager that it was his job to call the

police. Then we had to stand around for a while until they showed

up. When they did, there were a half dozen of them, two constables

and four senior members. They took us into the back room of the

liquor store for questioning. At the end of the questioning, the con-

stable said, “Okay, we’ll send you a summons in the mail if we decide

to charge you.” Tom and I shared a bemused glance. As everybody

knows, the last shot in a televised story of this sort has the police car

pulling away from the curb after ushering the miscreants into the

back seat.

I should include a political philosophy note here about civil disobe-

dience since it’s a topic not well understood by many people, even by

some civil disobedients. They often detract from the focus of their

action by whining about whatever small punishment they may

receive or protesting that they’re really innocent because of the

greater good they’re doing. In protesting against apartheid, or what-

ever other evil, by breaking the public mischief law, you’re not claim-

ing that the minor law being violated is wrong, unless you’re some

kind of anarchist. Instead, you’re saying that evil is wrong, and

you’re prepared to accept whatever punishment is necessary in order

Apartheid | 65

for you to appeal to the public, a public of which you’re a normally

law-abiding member in good standing. It’s theoretically pretty simple.

Practically speaking, it’s only complicated in countries like China

where civil disobedients are still thrown in jail for ten years.

I said, “Constable, I have to inform you that if you don’t apprehend

us, it’s our intention to return to the store and do further damage.”

The officer said, “I’ll have to consult with my superiors.” The police

huddled. Perhaps they imagined that once we got done with South

African wine, we might move on to vodka from the neighbouring

province of Alberta. In due course, if a bit grumpily — I think it was

lunch hour for them — Tom and I were packed into the police cruiser,

and driven down to the police lockup at 222 Main Street. The cam-

eramen had their concluding shot.

Since the media is a player in this drama, something should be said

about its informational/disinformational roles in relation to political

acts. While Tom and I were awaiting our trial, one local newspaper

columnist worked himself up into an incensed state, devoting an

entire column to denouncing our “attention-seeking media stunt.”

This otherwise unremarkable and noxious bit of journalism stays in

mind because it’s both typical of the subtextual silences of much jour-

nalism and it raises questions about the ability to engage in political

action in nominal democracies where the media and most other

forums are dominated by the ideas of ruling-class corporations.

What I mean by “subtextual silences” is this. First, there’s nothing

“natural” about any “news.” While there’s a history, and even a pro-

fessional ethos, of how journalists decide that something is newswor-

thy, there’s also a strong sense in which all of the news is a “media

stunt,” i.e., a decision by journalists to feature some aspect of every-

day life that may or may not deserve such attention. Two of the best

bad examples of this are: 1) the media’s overemphasis on sporadic

violence, giving sensationalised attention to empathy-provoking mur-

ders while in fact violent crime is statistically declining, and 2) treat-

ing practically all business decisions as implicitly rational and good.

Second, even given the colloquial usage of “media stunt,” it’s not

clear why our citizenly action was any more of a manipulation of the

media than the ceaseless parade of political “photo-ops,” indirect

corporate advertising and governmental press conferences announc-

ing or defending some policy, such as the liquor minister’s defence of

apartheid. That is, the columnist in this case is subtextually silent

about why he’s so irked by us, a silence that makes me suspect that he

thinks the media should have the right to determine who is or isn’t a

legitimate political actor in the public forum. Apparently, not all

media stunts are created equal.

Finally, the one other interesting thing about this newspaper col-

66 | the short version



umn, as we now know from the ideas of deconstructionist reading,

centres around the trope of innocence and guilt. The columnist is

making the flimsy claim that Tom and I are “seeking attention” for

ourselves, rather than seeking to bring attention to the evil of

apartheid. The claim is flimsy because we’re not obvious crazies rant-

ing in formulaic jargon, but adults in our forties who speak in sen-

tences. At the same time, while chastising the protesters for

illegitimate attention-seeking, the column is silent, either willfully or

naively, about the columnist’s own attention-seeking self-portrait as a

tough-minded critic willing to blow the whistle on self-indulgent,

ineffective political activists. The column implicitly pretends that the

columnist isn’t a guy who has to come up with something three times

a week if he wants to continue to receive the attention of having his

name at the top of the column, not to mention his paycheque. More

important, the column is silent about the evil of apartheid, suggest-

ing, again implicitly, that it’s possible for one to be innocent, to not be

complicit, whereas the protesters are saying that everyone is impli-

cated, everyone could do what the protesters have done in order to

concretely resist that particular evil.

I’ve gone on about this topic at some length because the widely

observed passivity of the citizenry in nominally democratic societies

usually goes unexplained by the very institutions that are partially

responsible for reinforcing that passivity. How hard it was to imagine

distant South Africa, notwithstanding its brutal televised availability,

how hard it was to conceive of oneself as having the right, if not the

responsibility, to alleviate the suffering of people living far away

whom we did not know. Perhaps one definition of politics is caring

about strangers, a uniquely human ability. I consoled myself that this

neurotic column helped, in some small way, to increase public aware-

ness of the fact of apartheid.

While awaiting trial, the political problem of South African wine

and spirits in Canada was solved when the federal government

announced a national policy of boycotting South African products in

compliance with the United Nations’ anti-apartheid program, thus

taking the matter out of the hands of the free-market enthusiasts run-

ning the government of British Columbia.

The judge I appeared before some weeks later, a charming eccentric

named Wally Craig — I later got to know him at the local YMCA

health club where I play squash — gave me an absolute discharge in

exchange for forbidding me from making a speech in the courtroom.

Like most other directors of courtroom theatres, he preferred to

reserve the speechifying for himself.

These days, on television, I observe large groups of youthful

demonstrators in the streets of cities from Seattle to Genoa, protest-

Apartheid | 67

ing against capitalism. Apartheid has at long last ceased to exist in

South Africa. The strangest after-effect of apartheid for me is its

amnesiac absence in the present world, especially when I happen to

mention South Africa while talking with students in college classes I

teach. I’ll casually refer to, say, Nelson Mandela, the black former

president of South Africa and, feeling a sudden gap in the psychic

space of the classroom, I’ll glance up and recognize from the looks on

the students’ faces, that although these nineteen-year-olds were alive

when black people were racially denied any political existence what-

soever during the apartheid regime, that for them what I’m talking

about is history while for me it’s memory. For me, it’s real, for them

it’s abstract, and a frisson of despair snakes down my back, as I imag-

ine a dystopia in which almost everything has been forgotten.

Arcadia









A rcadia, like the Garden of Eden or El Dorado, is one of the many

images of utopia that human beings have imagined over the centuries.

The Argentine-born writer Alberto Manguel gave me a copy of his

friend Tomás Eloy Martínez’s book, The Peron Novel, and inscribed

on its flyleaf, “et in Arcadia ego,” a phrase popularised in the Renais-

sance (and sometimes credited to Virgil). It means, “And (even) in

Arcadia, I am.” “I” is the figure of death, and the phrase is a stark

reminder that death is everywhere present — yes, even in the earthly

paradise of that region of the Greek Pelopponesian peninsula, Arca-

dia, where amorous shepherds engaged in pastoral dialogues.

In summer 1992, at a gathering of writers held in the Banff Centre

for the Arts — a rather Arcadian place itself, located amid the alpine

forests of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada — I met

Martínez, whom Alberto, as the host of the occasion, had invited as a

guest. I often jokingly refer to Manguel, who is a Canadian citizen but

frequently lives elsewhere, as “Civilization’s ambassador to Canada,”

but it’s no joke. Alberto’s choice of Martínez as a visitor was perfect.

Martínez was working on a new novel, Santa Evita, a true story about

the fate of the corpse of Evita Peron, and the story he told us of writ-

ing it was more precise and intimate than any writer’s tale I’d ever

heard. When I asked Martínez to autograph my copy of his Peron

novel, he wrote, along with expressions of friendship, “Scripta

manet,” “the writing remains” — beyond our mortality. I’ve long had

the sense that writing, puny as it often seems, is our weapon against

time, yet at the same time, it always recalls us to our human fate.

In Nicolas Poussin’s 17th century painting, Et in Arcadia ego, the

phrase is discovered on a tombstone by a group of shepherds. Arca-

dia is inextricably linked to the homoerotic desire proclaimed in the

shepherds’ love for each other, recorded in the poems of the old

bards. The linkage is found in contemporary texts, too. The first part

of Evelyn Waugh’s homoerotic novel, Brideshead Revisited, is titled

“Et in Arcadia ego.” In Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest, he describes

his boyhood love affair in the early 1940s with 17-year-old Jimmy

Trimble as one in which “there was no guilt, no sense of taboo.”

Vidal adds, with characteristic arch wit, “But then we were in Arca-

68

Arcadia | 69

dia, not diabolic Eden.” Eden is read as a site of original sin; Arcadia

renders homosexual love almost innocent.

Perhaps a year or so after reading Vidal’s book, in summer 1996,

Thomas Marquard (a friend of mine from Berlin) and I rode on an

afternoon bus along the twisting, mountainous road that threads

through Arcadia. Not many shepherds in sight but, as we drove along

the main streets of the villages of Arkady, old men in black clothes sit-

ting at tables in their roadside cafés, watching the infrequent passing

traffic. Former shepherds, ex-loves?

Art aphorisms









Normal art: I’ve lately begun to entertain the perverse idea that mak-

ing art, or meaning, or trying to understand the world, are, contrary

to popular notions, normal activities of human beings, even an evolu-

tionary feature of our survival. It is the failure to do so that should be

seen as abnormal, odd, demented, and not the other way around.



Art and politics: While there’s no requirement for art to be political,

art today ought to see itself as an active cultural politics against

“entertainment,” which is the capitalist replacement of art and cul-

ture (for example, the replacement of books by “reality” TV).



Reasons to write: The writer Brian Fawcett gave a talk on “reasons to

write,” offering such reasonable motives as money, ideology, keeping

a record, healthy curiosity, and serving the Muse. The poet Lisa

Robertson wittily added love and revenge to the list. When I men-

tioned the subject to Robin Blaser, he immediately said, “Because of

life.” That is, the condition of our existence is sufficient reason to

interrogate it.

I’d say the same thing. What I mean by “life” is not a definition or

abstraction, but the sense conveyed by an Arthur Rimbaud poem, c.

1870, translated by Charles Olson:



. . . (O saisons, o chateaux!

Délires!



What soul

is without fault?



Nobody studies

happiness



Every time the cock crows

I salute him







70

Art aphorisms | 71

I have no longer any excuse

for envy. My life



has been given its orders: the seasons

seize



the soul and the body, and make mock

of any dispersed effort. The hour of death



is the only trespass



Art and Auschwitz: Theodor Adorno sternly declared in the wake of

the Holocaust that lyric poetry is impossible after Auschwitz. I think

that the best way to interpret that remark is not that good poetry

can’t be written after Auschwitz, but that good writing now requires

an understanding of the Holocaust.



Charles Olson’s dictum: “Art is life’s only twin.” That’s the banner

under which we ride into the fray.



Art, Life, and Imitation: Equally, there’s John Berger’s assertion, “Art

does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation, sometimes to propose

an alternative world, sometimes simply to amplify, to confirm, to

make social the brief hope offered by nature.”

The Anxious Asp









M emory, quick as a stolen kiss at midnight: for a year, age 24-25,

1965-66, in San Francisco, I worked in Arlene Arbuckle’s bars in

North Beach. There were two of them. On Grant Avenue, near Green

St., was her “respectable,” mostly-gay bar, the Capri, run by the bar-

tender-lieutenant of her little fiefdom, a prissy, lean, but hard-nosed

guy named Lee. The other establishment, a tiny beer-and-wine bar

called the Anxious Asp, was around the corner, on Green St., between

the Green Valley Restaurant and Gino and Carlo’s, Jack Spicer’s liter-

ary headquarters.

On a crowded Saturday night in Gino’s, sitting at Jack’s table, dur-

ing a lull in the evening, or maybe just needing a breath of foggy fresh

air, somebody — George Stanley or Lew Ellingham or I — would get

up and announce, “I’m going to take a look at the Asp for a minute.”

Inside the Asp it was even more crowded, and the jukebox, even

louder than in Gino’s, was playing the same Beatles songs, “She’s A

Woman,” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” over and over. The

atmosphere was, compared to the sedately drunken Gino’s, more

frenzied, erotic, given to abandon. Although there wasn’t any room

to dance, there was a kind of dancing in the Asp. Gino’s was the old

world: Italian leftists breaking out into an occasional chorus of “Ban-

dera Rossa”; the alcoholic longshore foreman Tom, our Roman cen-

turion, pounding his fist against an imaginary warrior’s breastplate;

poetry in the person of the hunched figure of Jack Spicer. The Asp

was the new world, the world of the Beatles, rock’n’roll, cool images

rather than feeling, as Spicer complained. It was just after the 1964

American presidential election — the first since John F. Kennedy’s

assassination — and George Stanley had compaigned for Lyndon

Johnson against the right-wing Republican candidate, Barry Goldwa-

ter. “In your heart, you know he’s right,” went Goldwater’s slogan.

“And in your guts, you know he’s nuts,” his opponents replied. It was

the beginning of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and in a sense, the begin-

ning of the Sixties.

I’d been working in the warehouses south of Market Street. Getting

a job at the Asp, and eventually at the Capri as well, introduced me to

the lesbian subculture of North Beach. Don’t remember how I got the

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The Anxious Asp | 73

job, maybe through Armando, a bartender friend of George’s, who

had worked for Arlene at various times. Arlene was a slim, curly-

haired, butch woman in her late 30s, who usually had a fem girlfriend

in tow. Occasionally one or the other of them would turn up in the

morning at the Capri, sporting a black eye, as I was setting up, slicing

the limes, peeling the lemons, putting the coffee on, while the morning

drinkers sat stiffly at the bar, awaiting their first hit of coffee and

brandy. Arlene’s best friend was a tall, masculine woman named Sher-

man who ran an artist’s supply shop on Grant. Sometimes, after work,

Sherman would join Arlene and her girlfriend and a couple of the

other women in their circle for an early evening cocktail. Arlene was a

discreet presence, who seemed to leave the running of her businesses

to her lieges. Or maybe, since I was an innocent, I didn’t really notice

much of what went on. I simply reported to Lee, who laid down the

rules, which mainly had to do with not stealing and keeping a certain

decorum, a tone that Lee liked to maintain, an idea of classiness.

If Gino’s was the Greek war camp, and the Capri was doomed Troy,

the Asp was mere “roistering in Thessaly,” as Socrates put it. The

shift ran from six in the evening to two in the morning. By midnight,

the Asp was in Bacchanalian dishevelment. A baseball bat was kept

under the bar in case of trouble. A nice neighbourhood character, a

nearly seven-foot-tall black man named Big Jim, took a liking to me,

and turned up periodically to keep an eye on the place. In return I

provided free beer. The poets trickled down from Gino’s during the

course of the evening, usually for a brief visit, but the Asp wasn’t their

kind of poetry, unless, like Lew or George, they’d gotten very drunk.

The Beatles warbled on. Sometimes the Asp was so crowded, the

party spilled out onto the sidewalk.

One midnight, I slipped into the john for a quick pee, and found

Doc Salter there, looking into the mirror. He was an attractive young

man, the same age as me. Something clicked — what? whatever —

and we stole a kiss at midnight. “Stick around for closing?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, though he wasn’t really gay, as I learned when we

bedded down later in the Swiss-American Hotel on Broadway. He

was just high on the excitement and his own desirability. “Do what

you want,” said that San Francisco Narcissus.

They’re all gone now, I’m pretty sure. I have a vague memory of

being told, maybe by George, of Arlene’s passing. Lee, Sherman, Big

Jim, Doc. Only the shades are dancing.

Athens









A t the centre of modern Athens is Omonia Square, a vast inferno of

roaring, polluting traffic. At the time, in July , it was undergoing

infrastructural redevelopment, so that ragged wooden hoardings and

the pounding of pile drivers and jackhammers were added to its usual

chaos. The square is surrounded on all four sides by shops, newspa-

per and cigarette kiosks, eateries, and slowly-moving glutinous

crowds of people. But Thomas Marquard, my travelling companion,

and I, who were staying at a cheap hotel behind Omonia Square,

weren’t looking for modern Athens.

Perhaps some other time we would seek out present-day Athenians,

look up its artists, or attempt to figure out the politics of this south-

ernmost great metropolis of Europe, a city of some three million peo-

ple. Instead, we were treating contemporary Athens, apart from

casual contacts with waiters, taxi drivers, desk clerks and the like, as

merely a translucent palimpsest through which to peer down its many

historical strata to the polis that existed around the th century BCE

Looking south along one of the narrow, traffic-clogged commercial

streets — we were standing in front of a grocery where we’d stopped

to buy plastic bottles of water to rehydrate ourselves in the July heat

— we could see at the horizon the -metre-high gleaming Acropolis,

a big stone plateau covered with the columned facades of the ruins of

its temples. Thomas, a thorough and indefatigable traveller, saved me

from my usual lethargy upon arrival in a new city, and we set off

immediately for the winding, circular trek up to the heights.

We paused at the Theatre of Dionysus, a stone amphitheatre carved

into the back side of the rock, resting for a moment in the seats once

occupied by theatre-going citizens who had seen the tragedies and

comedies of Euripedes and Aristophanes on opening nights in the th

century BCE. Thomas, a drama teacher and theatre director at a

Berlin high school, explained some of it to me.

We made it to the top, dutifully touring its most famous temple, the

Parthenon, whose construction began in  BCE, when the city’s

eventual greatest philosopher, Socrates, was a young man in his early

twenties. But Socrates — who, allegedly a stonemason in his youth,

may have even worked on the project — though conventionally

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Athens | 75

observant, was never really interested in the Greek gods nor, I sus-

pect, the temples atop the Acropolis where they were worshipped.

From the Areopagos, a nearby hill of slithery russet-coloured marble,

it was possible to find a perch and look down over its rim to a patch

of rubble far below.

That was our destination, the Agora or marketplace of ancient

Athens, once the centre of the known world. Here, amid its streets

and shops, baths, schools, gymnasia and public spaces, Socrates had

entered into those teasing, probing conversations in which modern

discourse has its roots. What’s striking about the dialogues preserved

(and half-invented) by Plato — I was re-reading his Symposium dur-

ing this trip — are precisely how recognizable they are to us. That is,

between the end of ancient Rome around  CE and, say, the th

century Renaissance, almost a thousand years later, there is no talk so

understandable to us, either in terms of subject matter — how to self-

consciously live a good, or at least examined, life — or method,

namely, secular arguments about definition, meaning, categories. So

much of the intervening discourse really is phantasmal chatter about

how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I was introduced to that talk in my mid-twenties when I studied

political philosophy with Bob Rowan at the University of British

Columbia. We read the Apology, in which Socrates, charged with

corruption of the young and worshipping false gods, pleads and loses

his case before an Athenian jury that sentences him to death. Then

the Crito, set in the Athens jail, where Socrates rejects his wealthy

friend Crito’s offer to arrange his escape. Can you imagine me, at my

age, roistering in Thessaly? Socrates asks. No thanks, he says, declin-

ing the offer of escape, in the polis we have our second birth, after

being born of our parents, and it is the City that raises and nurtures

us. Should I reject its laws now, simply because of a decision that goes

against me? And finally, the Phaedo, and the last conversation

between Socrates and his friends before he drinks the fatal hemlock,

and feels the cold chill of death move up his limbs. Now, once again,

on our travels in Greece, I was reading the Symposium, where

Socrates, Aristophanes and their friends spend the night talking

about the nature of love.

What’s more, the appearance of such talk in Athens in  BCE is a

surprise in human history. In contradistinction, the warrior society

talk of Troy or Sparta is of a piece with the kingdoms of Mesopotamia

and Egypt or the stateless warlord regimes of contemporary Africa or

central Asia. The ritual language about the gods atop the Acropolis

has its equivalent everywhere. You can find great temples and palaces

all over the world. Nor is the marvellous Greek theatre entirely unex-

pected. Its stories of the legendary heroes, the pity and terror of

76 | the short version



implacable fate, arise from the ritual search for right conduct in the

relations between humans and the gods. And while the talk of com-

merce and human desire is trans-temporal, before Athens there was

no talk like this, no semi-abstract argumentation that sought mean-

ing. This Greek discourse does not replace poetry, the basic mode of

story-telling that begins with Gilgamesh (although Plato inveighs

against poetry in his Republic), but is another way of knowing,

another attempt, as the philosopher Wilfred Sellars once put it, “to

see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang

together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.”

While I’d feel as estranged from the Jews in dusty Jerusalem at the

time of Jesus as I am from the ravings of contemporary born-again

Christians, and as distant from medieval courts as we are from the

ziggurats of our digitalized bankers, I have the sense of utterly know-

ing these Athenians, from their philosophic ponderings to their young

adults who remain erotically alive for us in the suspended desire of

their sculptures or the late-night talk of the Symposium. I’m aston-

ished that the talk of the Greeks is conversant with the latest develop-

ments in postmodern theory. Socrates would not be baffled by

Richard Rorty.

Thomas and I ambled along the sun-baked streets of the Agora.

What remain are the stumps of the foundations of buildings. Here are

the outlines of the gym where naked youths stretched their bodies;

here at the north end of the Agora is the prison where Socrates was

executed; here’s the broad ramp leading to the procession road up to

the Acropolis. Almost impossible to imagine it, even with Thomas’s

reading of the maps, were it not for the adjacent reconstructed Stoa,

the colonnaded trading hall that now houses the Agora museum. In a

dusty glass case, we found some eggcup-sized drinking thimbles,

allegedly the kind used for administering the hemlock that Socrates

drank. Outside, in the blistering heat again, a tortoise emerged from

the rubble of the foundations, like a figure from Zeno’s paradox.

And that is all that’s left, this patch of ground in contemporary,

debased Athens. That, and a few similar ruins scattered about the

city. Outside of Athens, once we were on the road, across the

Corinthian isthmus into the Pelopponeses, there were other old places

— Olympia, Mycenae, Arcady, seaside Navplion on the Bay of Argos.

In each place, in the morning, before we went out to see the ancient

world, I read Plato’s Symposium. Each of us who reads has such land-

mark books, re-read again and again in the course of a lifetime. The

symposium is an evening drinking party, held at the house of the

young and handsome playwright Agathon, whose work has just been

performed and won the first prize at the theatre of Dionysus, in

whose seats Thomas and I had sat. The subject of the Symposium is

Athens | 77

the nature of Eros. The dialogue contains three and a half great

speeches. The most practical talk is that of Pausanias who, in specific

detail, explains the rules and motives for courting boys, and how

those of Athens differ from Sparta, other Greek cities, and the Persian

kingdom, where men are not as devoted to conversation as in Athens.

The greatest speech, aesthetically, is that of the comic playwright

Aristophanes, who declares that love is “the desire and pursuit of the

whole,” and tells the story of how the gods divided us into two parts

so that we go through life seeking our other half, and warns that if we

continue in our errant ways, the gods will split us again, cutting us

into quarters the way a hair is used to slice a hard-boiled egg.

Socrates’s speech is metaphysical, and attempts to link the desire for a

particular beautiful boy with larger and larger forms of love, up a lad-

der of desire, until we contemplate the nature of the beautiful itself.

The half-great speech is provided by Alcibiades, a drunken young

warrior and politician in his late s, who tells the story of how, years

ago, when he was the most beautiful youth in Athens, he offered him-

self to Socrates, crawling into the philosopher’s bed and wrapping a

blanket around the two of them, but that Socrates rejected this offer

of beauty, not satisfied that Alcibiades was interested in the pursuit of

truth, which would be one of the appropriate motives for entering

into a relationship with someone. The chaste night they spent

together is the source of the mistaken notion of “platonic love.” But

reading the banter between Alcibiades and Socrates once more, at the

seaside port of Navplion, it was clear to me that of course they had

had sex together, on other occasions, many times, though in the end,

Alcibiades proved a moral disappointment to his would-be teacher.

Of all the places we saw, the most beautiful was Delphi. It’s a tem-

ple north of the Pelopponesian peninsula, up in the mountains. The

Athenians came there by boat to question the Delphic oracle. We

spent half a day wandering through its ruins, looking out from the

mountain on whose slope it is set, down the throat of a long valley to

the small port, Itea, on an inlet of the Ionion waters, where the Athe-

nians landed. That evening we ate dinner at a terrace restaurant,

which had a similar view of the valley. The night sky was a pure black

that neither Thomas nor I, we both noted with some amazement, had

ever seen before. The black heavens were marked by a constellation

of stars just at the horizon — Scorpio, Thomas told me. As we left the

restaurant terrace, we gazed down the valley under its black sky a last

time. For an instant, it seemed all of a piece: magical Delphi, where

the Athenians learned from the Delphic oracle that no one among

them was wiser than Socrates, who alone knew how little he knew.